L'Inconnue de la Seine
Encyclopedia
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
for "the unknown woman of the Seine") was an unidentified young woman whose death mask
Death mask
In Western cultures a death mask is a wax or plaster cast made of a person’s face following death. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits...
became a popular fixture on the walls of artists' homes after 1900. Her visage was the inspiration for numerous literary works.
History
According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine RiverSeine
The Seine is a -long river and an important commercial waterway within the Paris Basin in the north of France. It rises at Saint-Seine near Dijon in northeastern France in the Langres plateau, flowing through Paris and into the English Channel at Le Havre . It is navigable by ocean-going vessels...
at the Quai du Louvre
Quai du Louvre
The Quai François Mitterrand is a quay by the River Seine in Paris, France, along the stretch where the Palais du Louvre is situated. Formerly Quai du Louvre, it was renamed Quai François Mitterrand after the former French president on October 26, 2003.- External links :* by Claude Monet*...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
around the late 1880s. The body showed no signs of violence, and suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
was suspected.
A pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a moulder make a plaster
Plaster
Plaster is a building material used for coating walls and ceilings. Plaster starts as a dry powder similar to mortar or cement and like those materials it is mixed with water to form a paste which liberates heat and then hardens. Unlike mortar and cement, plaster remains quite soft after setting,...
cast
Casting
In metalworking, casting involves pouring liquid metal into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowing it to cool and solidify. The solidified part is also known as a casting, which is ejected or broken out of the mold to complete the process...
death mask
Death mask
In Western cultures a death mask is a wax or plaster cast made of a person’s face following death. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits...
of her face. According to other accounts, the mask was taken from the daughter of a mask manufacturer in Germany. The identity of the girl was never discovered. Claire Forestier estimated the age of the model at no more than 16, given the firmness of the skin.
In the following years, numerous copies were produced. The copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
society. Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
and others compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...
, inviting numerous speculations as to what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.
The popularity of the figure is also of interest to the history of artistic media, relating to its widespread reproduction. 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 the water, but the apparent preservation of these details in the visage of the cast seemed to only reinforce its authenticity.
Critic A. Alvarez wrote in his book on suicide, 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
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
, Alvarez reports, "the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot
Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a French former fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex-symbols of the 1960s.In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer...
was for the 1950s. He thinks that German actresses like Elisabeth Bergner
Elisabeth Bergner
Elisabeth Bergner was an actress.She was born Elisabeth Ettel in Drohobycz, Austro-Hungarian Empire ....
modeled themselves on her. She was finally displaced as a paradigm by Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo , born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress. Garbo was an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Many of Garbo's films were sensational hits, and all but three were profitable...
."
L'Inconnue in English literature
The earliest mention can be found in Richard Le GallienneRichard Le Gallienne
Richard Le Gallienne was an English author and poet. The American actress Eva Le Gallienne was his daughter, by his second marriage.-Life and career:...
's 1900 novella The Worshipper of the Image, in which an English poet falls in love with the mask, eventually leading to the death of his daughter and the suicide of his wife.
An image of L'Inconnue has recently (December 2010) been used on the cover illustration for the novel 'A Habit Of Dying' by DJ Wiseman.
L'Inconnue in German literature
The protagonistProtagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
of Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
's only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), reflects:
- "The caster I 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.“
In 1926 Ernst Benkard published Das letzte Antlitz, a book about 126 death masks, writing about our subject that she is "like a delicate butterfly to us, who, carefree and exhilarated, fluttered right into the lamp of 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.“)
Reinhold Conrad Muschler's 1934 widely translated best-selling novel Die Unbekannte 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 and, after a romance, commits suicide in the Seine when Bentick returns to his fiancée. This novel was turned into a film of the same name in 1936.
Other examples appear in:
- Hertha PauliHertha PauliHertha Pauli was an Austrian journalist, author and actress.- Biography :Hertha Ernestine Pauli was born in Vienna, the daughter of the feminist Bertha Schütz and the medical scientist Wolfgang Pauli...
's 1931 story L'Inconnue de la Seine, which first appeared in the Berliner TageblattBerliner TageblattThe Berliner Tageblatt or BT was a German language newspaper published in Berlin from 1872-1939. Along with the Frankfurter Zeitung, it became one of the most important liberal German newspapers of its time.-History:... - Ödön von HorváthÖdön von HorváthEdmund Josef von Horváth was a German-writing Austro-Hungarian-born playwright and novelist...
's play based on his friend Hertha Pauli's story, written in 1934 and titled Eine Unbekannte aus der Seine - Claire GollClaire GollClaire Goll was a German-French writer and journalist. She was the spouse of Yvan 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 Russian literature
Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
's 1934 poem L'Inconnue de la Seine, written in Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, was published in Poslednie Novosti in 1934. It has been argued that this poem has as much to do with the Russian myth of rusalka
Rusalka
In Slavic mythology, a rusalka was a female ghost, water nymph, succubus, or mermaid-like demon that dwelled in a waterway....
as with the mask itself.
L'Inconnue in American literature
Chuck PalahniukChuck Palahniuk
Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter...
, in his novel Haunted (2005), writes about L'Inconnue in the story "Exodus," though there, he calls her "Breather Betty."
John Straley's 1999 mystery novel The Angels Will Not Care includes a club called "L'Inconnue de la Seine," people with terminal illnesses who wish to end their own lives.
L'Inconnue in French literature
Maurice BlanchotMaurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
, 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 with closed eyes, enlivened by a smile so relaxed and at ease... that one could have believed that she drowned in an instant of extreme happiness")
In 1931, Jules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle
Jules Supervielle was a French poet and writer born in Uruguay.Jules Supervielle always kept away from Surrealism which was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century...
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
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
's 1944 novel Aurélien, L'Inconnue played a significant role as one of the main characters attempts to rejuvenate the mask from various photographs. At the beginning of the 1960s Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
contributed photographs to a new edition of the work.
CPR doll
The face of the unknown woman was used for the head of the first aidFirst aid
First aid is the provision of initial care for an illness or injury. It is usually performed by non-expert, but trained personnel to a sick or injured person until definitive medical treatment can be accessed. Certain self-limiting illnesses or minor injuries may not require further medical care...
mannequin Rescue Annie. It was created by Peter Safar
Peter Safar
Peter Safar was an Austrian physician of Czech descent. He is credited with pioneering cardiopulmonary resuscitation.- Early life :...
and Asmund Laerdal
Asmund Laerdal
Asmund Laerdal is the founder of Laerdal Medical, based in Stavanger, Norway. Laerdal established a publishing house in 1940, specializing in greetings cards and children's books. The company soon expanded into the manufacturing of wooden toys. Pioneering in soft plastics in the early 1950s,...
in 1958 and was used starting in 1960 in numerous CPR courses. Therefore, the face has been called by some "the most kissed face" of all time.