L’Inconnue de la Seine
In the late 1880s, the drowned body of a young woman was recovered from the River Seine in Paris. It was the custom to display unidentified bodies at the Paris mortuary, in the hope that someone would recognize and claim them. The appearance of the body of this particular young woman was particularly notable. The girl, who was estimated to be around sixteen years old, looked like she was asleep rather than dead. “Her beauty was breathtaking, and showed few signs of distress at the time of passing,” the pathologist on duty remarked,” So bewitching that I knew beauty as such must be preserved.”
So, the pathologist had a mask made of the girl’s face. Some felt that the serene features of L’Inconnue de la Seine– the unknown woman of the Seine as she became known- were at odds with the usual features of the drowned. They believed that the mask must have been made from a living model, the majority of Parisian society was captivated by the girl’s appearance and her tragic end. L’Inconnue became the inspiration for writers and artists who attempted to recreate her story.
Some imagined she was an innocent country girl seduced and abandoned by a wealthy lover who drowned herself after she became pregnant. Others saw a more destructive element to the mask. Richard Le Gallienne, in his 1899 novella, The Worshipper of the Image describes how an obsession with the mask destroys his hero, a young poet. Meanwhile, the mask quickly became a work of art in its own right, with copies gracing the halls and homes of fashionable Parisian society.
In the twentieth century, L’Inconnue’s immortality was assured when she was chosen as the face of the world’s first CPR training mannequin. In the late 1950s, a Norwegian toy manufacturer Asmund Laerdal was approached to make the training aid for the life-saving technique, which was then in its infancy. Laerdal agreed as he had nearly lost his son to drowning. He chose the face of L’Inconnue as he felt the aspect of a young woman would be less daunting for trainees. The resulting figure, called Resusci Anne made her first appearance in 1960.
A solution to the mystery of the real identity of L’Inconnue could lie in Liverpool, England. A story on BBC News tells how on a visit to France in the early twentieth century, an elderly lady saw a mask of L’Inconnue outside a Paris shop. She instantly recognized the mask’s features as those of her long-lost twin sister who had eloped to Paris with her lover years before and was never heard from again. Others, however, had to search for well-known faces through heaps of heads before they could make their death masks.