The dust-jacket flap for Kate Berridge’s, “Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax” (William Morrow, 352 pages, $25.95) reads as follows:

In ‘Madame Tussaud’ Kate Berridge tells this fascinating woman’s complete story for the first time, drawing upon a wealth of sources, including Tussaud’s memoirs and historical archives. It is a grandscale success story — how with sheer graft and grit a woman born in 1761 to an eighteen-year-old cook overcame extraordinary reversals of fortune to build the first and most enduring worldwide brand identified simply by reference to its founder’s name: Madame Tussaud’s.

The “complete story for the first time”? Ms. Berridge does not put it so baldly in her book, but the description quoted above is true in quite an unusual way: This biography has presented the complete story by paradoxically discounting a good deal of what Madame Tussaud told in her memoirs, while at the same time providing a grand-scale perspective on Tussaud’s important role in shaping how we view the human personality. In short, Tussaud’s work provided a boost to biographers and an accessibility to history that fed the appetite of millions.

Tussaud generated, in Ms. Berridge’s words, the “thrill of the mimetic.” Tussaud fashioned three-dimensional wax figures of notables such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Franklin with such astounding facility that viewers imagined themselves in the presence of history. As she asserted in one of her catalogues, she aimed to “blend utility with amusement,” and “to convey to the minds of young persons much biographical knowledge — a branch of education universally allowed to be of the highest importance.”

How could she make such extravagant claims? First, there was the uncanny verisimilitude of her creations — not merely her ability to render facial features but also to model clothing and gestures, and present period works of art in a dramatic theatrical setting. She had many competitors, but none that surpassed and few that equaled her artistic gifts, which had been honed during her apprenticeship under Philippe Curtius, whose wax figures delighted both the French court and the masses. Through Curtius, Tussaud would have had access to some of the illustrious figures whom she would later represent in wax during her career in Britain

But more importantly, what set Tussaud apart from her competitors was her ability to brand herself, which she did by making herself a witness to history. In her memoirs, Tussaud reported her conversations with Louis XVI, Voltaire, and Rousseau, for example. One-by-one Ms. Berridge destroys the credibility of these reports. Tussaud had a precocious talent, no doubt, but the idea that she became the intimate of Napoleon’s Josephine, or engaged in a dialogue with the Emperor himself, becomes a preposterous idea after reading Ms. Berridge’s astute analysis of what court life, class structure, and culture amounted to in 18th-century France

Similarly, Tussaud’s claim that she had made death masks and casts of heads as they were struck off by the guillotine is unlikely, Ms. Berridge argues. Tussaud was in Paris during the Revolution, the Terror, and Napoleon’s accession to power, but the picture of dead heads falling into her bloody apron is probably a Tussaud invention. Her conversations with Voltaire in Paris surely did not take place, since lates that he was in the city for little more than two weeks during the entirety of Tussaud’s residence there.

Surprisingly, few contemporaries challenged Tussaud’s accounts — in part because she waited to release her memoirs (actually written by someone else) after many of the principals had long been dead; in part, because her work seemed so authentic. In reality, however, Tussaud probably took many of her likenesses from sculptures and other works of art, Ms. Berridge speculates

Apparently few biographers have taken the trouble to assess Tussaud’s claims, which are the stuff of modern advertising.Yet Ms. Berridge is extraordinarily polite to her predecessors. Discussing her sources she writes: “Although I have taken a very different route, the following authors who made earlier journeys helped me to plot my course.” One of the titles listed, “Madame Tussaud” (2003) by Teresa Ransom, swallows most of the Madame’s stories whole

Tussaud, Ms. Berridge never forgets, was in show business. She made a museum out of what had once been a carnival attraction, a side show not much different from the exploitation of freaks. She brought all classes into her Baker Street establishment by nurturing the human desire to see history “up close and personal.” Dickens saw her as both an artist and businesswoman, portraying her as Mrs. Jarley in “The Old Curiosity Shop.”

But Ms. Berridge views Madame Tussaud as more than a historic relic, successful at a time when people did not know what historical figures looked like. Millions continue to visit Madame Tussaud’s in London, New York, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong.With so much media available now —so much ready access to history — why?

Because she is a great artist and biographer. Her portrait of Benjamin Franklin, reproduced in Ms. Berridge’s book, is like nothing else. The deep-set eyes, the bunched lips (a Franklin without his dentures?), and the inscrutable facial expression all make him authentic. In this case, judging by Ms. Berridge’s account, it is likely that Tussaud did have Franklin in the flesh to work with. Unlike painted portraits of him, which attempt to capture his benevolent, if shrewd, humor, this waxwork presents the Franklin who showed up in Paris affecting to be a plain Quaker.

But then, even to say that much is to cast into words what Madame Tussaud’s art leaves open and unstated. Biographers have a tendency to use photographs and paintings as evidence, pretending they can see personality traits in a look, a gesture, a posture, and so on. Biography, in other words, is an act of projection, a reading into what may be there, or half there and half in the biographer’s imagination. Madame Tussaud, on the other hand, allows us to gaze on what her hands have made of history. “This is the hand that touched the hand of Henry James,” said Frances Partridge, the Bloomsbury diarist, when we met.

Madame Tussaud still makes us believe that we can put a hand on history, so to speak, or at least stand there, staring at it, in the round, when we visit her museums. Sometimes she is fooling us, to be sure, but all biography, like all history, is, at bottom, an act of faith.

crollyson@nysun.com