L'Inconnue de la Seine

L'Inconnue de la Seine

L'Inconnue de la Seine (from French for the unknown woman of the Seine) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artist homes after 1900. Her visage was the inspiration for numerous literary works in both French and other languages as well.

The legend of her suicide begins in 1900, when her body was pulled out of the Seine River in Paris. A worker at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face. In the following years, numerous copies were produced, and these copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. In similar fashion to the smile of Mona Lisa, there were numerous speculations on what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.

The afterimages provided another interesting aspect to her popularity. The original cast had been photographed, and new casts were created back from the film negatives. These new casts displayed details that are usually lost in bodies taken from rivers and lakes, but the apparent preservation of these details in the visage of the cast seemed to only reinforce its authenticity.

Critic A. Alvarez writes in The Savage God: "I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her." According to Hans Hesse of the University of Sussex, Alvarez reports, "the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s. He thinks that German actresses like Elisabeth Bergner modeled themselves on her. She was finally displaced as a paradigm by Greta Garbo."

L'Inconnue in German literature

The protagonist in Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) reflects:

"The caster I go visit every day has two masks hanging next to his door. The face of the young one who drowned, which someone copied in the morgue because it was beautiful, because it was still smiling, because its smile was so deceptive – as though it knew."

„Der Mouleur, an dem ich jeden Tag vorüberkomme, hat zwei Masken neben seiner Tür ausgehängt. Das Gesicht der jungen Ertränkten, das man in der Morgue abnahm, weil es schön war, weil es lächelte, weil es so täuschend lächelte, als es wüßte.“

Ernst Benkard writes in the 1926 story Das letzte Antlitz, which appeared in a volume of translated stories about death masks, writes that she is "like a delicate butterfly to us, who, carefree and exhilarated, fluttered right into the lamp off life, scorching her fine wings." („uns jedoch ein zarter Schmetterling, der, sorglos beschwingt, an der Leuchte des Lebens seine feinen Flügel vor der Zeit verflattert und versengt hat.“)

Other examples appear in:

• Reinhold Conrad Muschler's 1934 novel Die Unbekannte (which tells the maudlin story of the fate of the provincial orphan Madeleine Lavin, who has fallen in love with the British diplomat Lord Thomas Vernon Bentick)
• Vladimir Nabokov's 1934 poem L'Inconnue de la Seine
• Hertha Pauli's (wife of Wolfgang Pauli) 1931 story L'Inconnue de la Seine, which first appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt
• Ödön von Horváth's play based on his friend Hertha Pauli's story, written in 1934 and titled Die Unbekannte aus der Seine
• Claire Goll's 1936 short story Die Unbekannte aus der Seine, in which the protagonist peers into a death mask and dies from a heart attack caused by delusion and guilt as he believes he recognizes the face as his daughter's.

L'Inconnue in French literature

Maurice Blanchot, who actually owned one of the masks, described her as „une adolescente aux yeux clos, mais vivante par un sourire si délié, si fortuné, [...] qu'on eût pu croire qu'elle s'était noyée dans un instant d'extrême bonheur“ ("a young girl that, though her eyes were closed, still seemed alive with such a relaxed happy smile ..., a smile that one could imagine her wearing in that blissful moment she descended into the water.")

In 1931, Jules Supervielle once described the perspective of one dealing with the wearies of life as the First-person narrative of the sense and the nonsense of suicide.

In Louis Aragon's 1944 novel Aurélien, L'Inconnue played a significant role as one of the main characters attempts to rejuvenate the mask from various photographs.

Other information

The face of the unknown woman was used for the head of the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie. It was created by Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal in 1958 and was used starting in 1960 in numerous CPR courses. Therefore, the face has been called by some as the most "kissed" face of all time.

External links

• "l'Inconnue de la Seine" by Anja Zeidler