In 1802, a 42-year-old Frenchwoman named Marie Gresholtz arrived in London, with her four-year-old son and three wax statues. The son was the product of a short-lived marriage to one François Tussaud; the three Sleeping Beauties were part of her inheritance, left by her guardian Philippe Curtius, stormer of the Bastille and sculptor extraordinaire.

The woman, who would become known as Madame Tussaud, had lived in the company of wax since she was six. Apprenticed to Curtius, she was summoned to Versailles to teach Louis XVI’s sister how to make wax flowers and medallions. Soon she found herself producing effigies of the royal family’s decapitated heads.

Suspected of royalist sympathies, she was prepared for the guillotine herself, but managed to flee to England, where she toured the waxworks that had made Curtius famous in France. All three of the aristocratic women on whom the famous Sleeping Beauties were modelled had by then lost their lives. Making a new life for herself at the helm of a travelling show, Madame Tussaud now found herself directing a strange theatre of female objectification and male fantasy.

The Sleeping Beauty based on Louis XV’s mistress Madame du Barry was one of Curtius’s earliest works. She can still be seen in Madame Tussaud’s today, although the clockwork mechanism by which she breathed is now electric. Reclining as if ravished, her long neck exposed and her fleshy chest gently heaving underneath her beautiful dress, she is – ostentatiously – the product of a male imagination. This is a veiled fetish: a famous mistress, breathing yet unconscious of the voyeurism for which she was built, prey to the fantasies of all.