It is the late 1880s, and Paris is a city swirling with life. It is an era of urban sprawl, and the big cities of Europe grow vast and fill with millions of people.
There are triumphs and tragedies aplenty in this time of great change, both big and small. Perhaps one of the less noted tragedies occurred at the Quai de Louvre, where the body of a young woman was pulled from the Seine, just another victim of a cruel world.
It was believed that the young girl had committed suicide, as there was no sign of violence or disarray on the body. But in truth to the authorities, and everyone since, she is a complete mystery. We do not even know her name.
The story of this young girl does not end here, however. Her fame was just beginning.
A Morbid Beauty
A pathologist at the Paris Morgue charged with managing the body, so the story goes, was so struck by her beauty that he felt compelled to make a death mask of her face, so that it would be always preserved. And it would turn out that he was not the only person who found the dead girl beautiful.
The mask became a popular feature in the Bohemian, devil-may-care society of Paris. Many copies were made and “L’Inconnue de la Seine”: the unknown girl of the Seine, as she came to be known, soon became a familiar face.
She soon entered into the pop cultural consciousness of the time, as something weirdly erotic. Books were written about men who became infatuated with her, and paintings struggled to capture her allure. Silent era movie stars even based their looks on her.
Such fascination with death masks is not uncommon, and indeed at the time such creations were very popular. But it was the fate of l’Inconnue de la Seine to end her famous afterlife in a much more practical and useful fashion: by saving lives.
In 1958 Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal were working on a first aid mannequin, and they needed a face for their creation. They selected l’Inconnue de la Seine and she has been the face of “Resusci Anne” ever since, being described somewhat grimly as “the most kissed face of all time.”
A strange postscript to an unknown life then, a Paris waif who was totally unknown in life and valued by thousands in death? That’s how the story goes, but sadly the story may just be too good to be true.
For a start, Paris Morgue pathologists do not simply go around taking death masks of drowned women who take their fancy. Furthermore there is the mask itself, which does not look like a woman who died by drowning.
Then there are the other stories. The artist Jules Joseph Lefebvre stated he knew the death mask to have been taken from a young girl who died of tuberculosis in 1875. Other tales tell of the mask being of the mask manufacturer’s German daughter, and in the United States the girl is known as “La Belle Italienne,” further complicating things.
So, it turns out that maybe we don’t know who l’Inconnue de la Seine is at all, after all. But given that this is where we were anyway, I think it is just best to accept the mystery.
Top Image: 1914 Painting of the death mask of l’Inconnue de la Seine. Source: Lucie van Dam van Isselt / Public Domain.
By Joseph Green
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