The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw a booming market for morbid relics. Fabricated locks of hair, counterfeit splinters from the scaffold, and forged letters flooded collectors' cabinets. Separating genuine historical items from post-revolutionary marketing requires strict provenance testing.
First, Marie Grosholtz’s presence at the Madeleine cemetery is verified through police records and municipal registry notations from the Paris Commune. The revolutionary government systematically employed Curtius’s workshop to make death masks as forensic documentation. Grosholtz was a registered artisan operating under strict civic surveillance. Failing to perform a state-ordered mold could lead directly to accusations of royalist sympathies, and a trip to the scaffold herself.
Second, the dimensional accuracy of the mask matches surviving personal artifacts. Measurements of Marie Antoinette’s silk slippers, bonnets, and velvet bodices preserved in French archives correspond to the petite cranial dimensions documented in the plaster cast. If Grosholtz had fabricated the face from memory, the cast would mirror the generalized, neoclassical facial templates popular in 1790s sculpture. Instead, the mask displays raw, asymmetrical flaws that point to a direct facial impression.
