One has, therefore, little material to assist him in gaining an insight into the artists’ careers, or to guide in the forming of a just opinion either as to the exact character of their work or the nature of their subjects. Miniatures in coloured wax, modelled in fairly high relief and framed and glazed in the ordinary way as pictures, seem to offer a general idea and the best conception of the work that emanated from the studio during these momentous years, so pregnant with meaning for the near future. [Illustration: LOUIS XVI AND THE DUKE OF ORLEANS Specimens of the few existing examples of Curtius’s miniature work. Modeled from life shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution.] The pity of the loss is that the work, taken direct from life, afforded a faithful record of important personages. Of this there is ample proof, and that the models should have been of so ephemeral a character is a matter of great regret, extending far beyond the feelings of the artists’ descendants. Yet, when one remembers the hatred of the populace towards the aristocrats and those holding authority under the Old Régime, it is not to be wondered at that many portraits should have shared, with their originals, the destructive effects of the antipathy that was shown both to patrons of art and to the art itself. It goes without saying that during the Reign of Terror people would be disposed to hide, or even to destroy, any art subject in their possession indicating their attachment to the Royalists. CHAPTER III Life-size figures--Museum at the Palais Royal--Exhibition on the Boulevard du Temple--Benjamin Franklin--Voltaire. A good deal of hearsay and some incontestable evidence helps to fill the hiatus between the time Curtius came to Paris and the outbreak of the Revolution. Although the many years spent by Curtius in the production of miniatures in coloured wax do not appear to have brought him a very great or a very wide reputation, yet they were the means of leading him to the modelling of life-size portraits in this same material, with the express intention of forming them into a collection solely for the object of exhibiting them to the public. Now it is to this important departure in the treatment of his works that we owe the present Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, an establishment with which his name must be for ever associated. He seems to have set his mind upon this venture round about the year 1776, and some years later to have opened a Museum of life-size portrait models at the Palais Royal, an enterprise that was soon to be followed by the opening of a second Exhibition of a far more renowned and interesting character on the Boulevard du Temple, to which we shall have occasion to refer more than once.