Unknown Seine woman lives on
The most famous person to have died in the Seine River has no identity at all. She is L’Inconnue de la Seine — the Unknown Woman of the Seine.
Here is her story. In the late19th century, the body of an unidentified young woman was fished out of the Seine in Paris. Because her body was free of wounds and blemishes, she was presumed to have committed suicide. The pathologist at the morgue that received her body was so mesmerized by her beauty that he called in a mouleur — a moulder — to preserve her face in a plaster death mask.
In the decades that followed, the mask was massproduced and sold as a decorative item for the walls of private homes and studios, first in Paris, then abroad. L’Inconnue became a muse for artists, poets and other writers, among them Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Rainer Maria Rilke and Vladimir Nabokov. L’Inconnue hung in the studio of Albert Camus, who called her a “drowned Mona Lisa.” She inspired some of the films of François Truffaut.
L’Inconnue is kept alive these days in an out-of-theway, family-run workshop in the southern Paris suburb of Arcueil. Founded in 1871, the workshop, L’Atelier Lorenzi, creates handmade, perfectly moulded plaster copies of figurines, busts, statues and masks the way it has for four generations. But it is bestknown for L’Inconnue.
In a box on the second floor of the atelier is its most precious possession: a 19th-century, chestnut-brown plaster mould of a death mask that is said to be that of L’Inconnue.
“You ask me if my great-grandfather made the mould himself, and I don’t know,” said Laurent Lorenzi Forestier, who runs the family business. “You ask me how the morgue organized the casting of the mould, and I don’t know. What I do know is that we have a mould from that period in time.”
L’Inconnue’s face is serene. Her cheeks are round and full, her skin smooth, her eyelashes matted to give the impression that they are still wet. Her hair is parted in the middle and pulled back behind her neck. She is young, perhaps still a teenager. She is pleasantlooking, but not classically beautiful.
It is the mystery of her half-smile that haunts. Her lips lack definition, perhaps the result of her body’s deterioration. She seems happy in death or maybe only asleep. And her eyes look as if they might open at any time.
Skeptics have claimed that the woman depicted in the mask could not have been a drowning victim, because her features are too perfect. Some scholars assert that it was common practice to resculpt death masks at the time.
L’Inconnue has been imagined in literature as a victim: an orphan who drowns herself in the Seine after an English aristocrat seduces and then abandons her. She also has been portrayed as a witch who destroys a young poet and as a seductress who witnesses a robbery and murder in a clockmaker’s shop. No documents survive in the Paris police archives. No trace of her body was found.