Alexandre Vattemare

The frontispiece portrait from his own 1822 memoirs, "Monsieur Alexandre, the Celebrated Dramatic Ventriloquist." Photo via Invaluable auction record.

Paris, sometime around 1813. A surgical student named Nicolas Marie Alexandre Vattemare is practicing on a cadaver when the corpse seems to groan, then speak. The other students bolt for the door. The instructors do not find it funny, and the young man never gets his diploma.^[8][10] That is how a surgeon never happened and a ventriloquist did instead. By the time he finished touring the world as Monsieur Alexandre, he had played more than 550 cities, filled a single evening with as many as thirty seven different characters without so much as a wooden head on his knee, and then spent the back half of his life giving away a fortune so ordinary people everywhere could get their hands on a book.^[4][8] Pull up a chair. This one runs from a Paris dissection table to a brass plaque in the floor of the Boston Public Library.

A voice too dangerous for medical school

He was born Nicolas Marie Alexandre Vattemare on November 7, 1796, on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris: a French ventriloquist who became, in his own lifetime, a philanthropist credited with creating the first international system for the exchange of items among libraries and museums.^[3][9][10] Somewhere between the ages of seven and ten, sitting in a Normandy seminary, the kid discovered he could imitate machinery, then instruments, then animals and insects, anything that made a sound worth stealing. The seminary did not appreciate the talent and expelled him for it.^[10] He went on to medical school in Paris anyway, where the cadaver incident finished the job the seminary started.^[4][10]

Then came the war. At eighteen, in 1814, he found himself responsible for three or four hundred typhus-stricken Prussian prisoners of war. When they were marched back toward Berlin, they asked him to come along.^[8][14] It was Berlin doctors, of all people, who told him in 1815 to quit medicine and get paid for the voices instead. He took the advice, put on the name Monsieur Alexandre, and never looked back.^[10]

Thirty-seven characters, no dummy in sight

Here is the part that separates him from almost everyone else in this archive. He did not carry a puppet. Rather than throw his voice through a figure, he mastered the illusion of separate characters speaking from different places in the room, as if one voice were coming from far away and another from right beside you.^[13] He wrote his own comic scripts and then acted every part in them himself, in French, German, or English depending on the house, switching voice and costume character to character in the same evening.^[4][12] A typical bill ran thirteen characters. His personal best, on record, was thirty seven.^[5] Over a twenty-year run, 1815 to roughly 1835, he carried that act through more than 550 cities, performed for the Tsar of Russia and for Queen Victoria, and counted Goethe, Lamartine, Pushkin, and Sir Walter Scott among his friends.^[8]

He had a signature trick that outlived him in the strangest way. In 1822 he demonstrated drinking a full glass of wine while carrying on a conversation, no pause in the voice at all.^[2][5] Fast forward to the winter of 1959: W.S. Berger, founder of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, put out a public appeal in The Oracle for the method behind that exact bit. Louis Spangler answered with a working method in early 1960, and a few months later Berger himself dated the trick back to Vattemare's 1822 performance. That is 138 years between one man's stage trick and our own community chasing down how he did it.^[2] He also had a darker side to his publicity. Around the same period he built a reputation for a prank that would never fly today: staging "dead" people who called out for help as if buried alive, pure shock theater to get his name in the papers. A whole 1822 book of anecdotes about him, "The Rogueries of Nicholas," grew out of stunts exactly like it.^[1]

His 1822 memoir survives, ten hand-colored plates deep, one portrait for nearly every character he played. The text was written by W.T. Moncrieff and the plates engraved by Robert Cruikshank; a copy carrying a Boston Public Library deaccession mark sold at Potter & Potter in February 2023 for $850.^[4][12] Three of his actual playbills also survive: the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand in July 1821, billed alongside a "Monsieur Chalons" and his "Wonderful Experiments of Philosophical Dexterity," plus near-identical bills in Belfast and Newcastle in 1824 for "The Rogueries of Nicholas." Those playbills list his full cast, Captain Furlough down to Squire Tivy, and his stock sound-effects menu on top of it: an omelet frying, a flint and steel, a plane, a saw, a corkscrew, a stick, and a guitar.^[6] All three sold as one lot at Forum Auctions in London in February 2025 for £240.^[6]

The plaque in the library floor

While he was still touring, in 1825, Vattemare set up something in Paris called the Agence Européenne des Échanges, an agency built to move duplicate books and prints between European libraries that were sitting on shelves nobody could reach. It earned him a nickname among European officials: the missionary of exchanges.^[10] By the time his stage career wound down, that side project had become the whole point of his life.

He crossed the Atlantic in 1839 to pitch the idea in America: let American and French libraries trade their duplicates back and forth. President Van Buren backed him, and by 1840 Congress had passed legislation supporting the plan.^[11] Boston is where it stuck. He was in the room for the first conversations about a public library there in 1841, Massachusetts passed the enabling law in April 1848, and in March 1854 the Boston Public Library opened its doors on Mason Street with about 16,000 volumes, French books from Vattemare's own donation among them.^[11] The library repaid him with a bronze plaque set right into the entrance-hall floor, bearing the name Vattemare, one of its founders.^[5]

Here is where our own community walks back into the story. In 1960, IBV members Les Lester and W.S. Berger made a special trip to the Boston Public Library, tracked down that same plaque, and photographed it. While they were there, library staff signed them in, checked a driver's license, and handed over the actual 1822 memoirs book for inspection: eleven colored plates, a signed steel engraving, the whole thing. Berger had already told the membership, in print, to go see it for themselves.^[2][5] A century after Vattemare gave up the stage, ventriloquists were still the ones showing up to honor what he built.

North to Canada, then the whole world

Vattemare did not stop at Boston. In October 1840 he arrived in Montreal, spent time first with Bishop Ignace Bourget and Governor Sydenham before he ever brought up ventriloquism, then proposed folding the city's three learned societies into one combined institute. The funding push in Montreal itself stalled, but the idea did not die: the Institut Canadien, founded in Montreal in 1844, followed his model closely enough that its own leaders were still crediting him for it by 1847.^[10]

By 1853 his exchange network had grown to 130 libraries worldwide. By 1860, an estimated 300,000 volumes had changed hands between the United States and France alone, and the American Library of Paris that he helped stock held 14,000 volumes of its own.^[11] His reach went well past libraries, too. The American painter George Catlin, famous for his portraits of Native American life, once wrote him a personal letter about presenting a portfolio of his own paintings to the King of England, the kind of favor you only ask a man whose name opened doors on both sides of the ocean.^[7]

Captain Furlough

One of ten hand-colored character plates in his 1822 memoirs, engraved by Robert Cruikshank for W.T. Moncrieff's text. Just one of the dozens of costumed characters Vattemare wrote and performed alone, with no puppet anywhere in the show.

Photo via Invaluable auction record

The whole cast, one man

Two surviving 1824 playbills list every character in a single Vattemare show, Captain Furlough down to Squire Tivy, plus his stock sound effects: an omelet frying, a corkscrew, a guitar. He was billed to play every one of them himself, alone.

Photo via Invaluable auction record

The library years

By the time a portrait like this one was made, Vattemare had traded the stage for a mission: moving the world's library duplicates so ordinary readers everywhere could get to them. A photograph from roughly the same years, taken by the Paris photographer Nadar, is simply titled "Vattemare, homme de lettres, explorateur."

Photo via FamousFix

What's left of him

Vattemare died in Paris on April 7, 1864.^[5][9][10] By 1960 a copy of the 1822 memoirs, plates and all, had made its way into the Vent Haven library, where the colored plates were reproduced and framed on the walls for visiting members to see in person.^[5] A copy of the book itself crossed the auction block at Potter & Potter in Chicago in February 2023, commanding real money from collectors two centuries after John Lowndes first printed it, and his surviving playbills did the same at Forum Auctions in London two years later.^[4][6]

Every other ventriloquist in this archive built a career and left it at that. Vattemare built a career, walked away from it at the top, and spent the rest of his life making sure a library duplicate sitting unread in Vienna or Munich could end up in the hands of somebody in Boston or Montreal who actually wanted to read it. He never carried a dummy on that stage. He carried an entire cast in his own throat instead, and when he finally put the act down, he spent his fortune making sure other people's voices, in the form of the books they wrote, could travel just as freely as his had.

Thirty-seven voices and not one wooden knee to rest them on, the nerve of the man. I like to think somewhere in Boston there is a library card he never got around to filing under D, for Dummy, Overlooked.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy