The mask of the “unknown from the Seine” hung in countless homes and inspired artists and authors. But was it really a Paris drowned woman? The doubts are increasing.
Her eyes are closed, a slight smile plays around the lips in the even face: “L’inconnue de la Seine”, the unknown woman from the Seine, is beautiful and she seems peaceful, even if her story isn’t. The face is said to be that of a girl, maybe 16 years old, fished lifeless out of the Seine at the end of the 19th century. Possibly a suicide. Because nobody knew who she was, her lifeless body is said to have been put on display – in the morgue in Paris, just behind Notre Dame Cathedral. The dead were presented there on twelve black marble slabs in the shop windows, a popular attraction at the time.
Then, the story goes, a pathologist, fascinated by her beauty, made a death mask of the girl. “Between the death and life masks of famous men like Beethoven and Oliver Cromwell” immediately noticed the face, writes the “Guardian“. Soon there were photographs and replicas of the mask. The Lorenzi plaster workshop at 19 rue Racine is said to have started mass production. Many people hung the morbid face in their apartments – and the Paris bohemian artists were inspired by it. Albert Camus once described the smile as that of a “drowned person Mona Lisa“.
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The mysterious “Inconnue” was first mentioned in a work as early as 1899, in Richard Le Gallienne’s novel “Worshipper of the Image”. A young poet is enchanted by the image of a dead woman and perishes. A good ten years later, the protagonist raves in the poet’s only novel Rainer Maria Rilke, “The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge”: “The mouleur (moulder, note) that I pass every day has hung two masks next to his door. The face of the drowned young woman, which they took off in the morgue because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively as if it knew.”
A diplomat is said to have left her
The German botanist and writer Reinhold Conrad Muschler attributed the girl to an unhappy romance, what else? A provincial orphan falls in love with a diplomat, but he leaves her and she goes into the water, “her face was smiling transfigured when they found her”. In the same year Vladimir Nabokov, possibly influenced by Muschler’s text, wrote a poem about “Inconnue”. The novella was also filmed as “The Unknown” by Frank Wisbar. From 1945 Man Ray tried to breathe life into the mask in photographs and laid it on a bed as if it were sleeping.
Ödön von Horváth wrote a comedy about the face, inspired by a story by his close friend, the actress and author Hertha Pauli. His aim in The Unknown Woman from the Seine (1933) was to depict the fate of “the suicide woman whose death mask is well known and whose tragedy has never been known,” he wrote. In the play, the young woman witnesses a robbery and goes into the Seine because she is in love with the criminal. Destruction of evidence as proof of love, so to speak.