MIMI ROMANELLI OFFRE SES MÈCHES DE CHEVEUX À RILKE

 

This minute lock of hair does not softly disperse 

the Arabic perfume of some Hetaera

nor the spikenard aroma of that young

Venetian lady painted by Dürer. 

It's rather redolent of the sirocco, and

-closing the eyes- the jasmines in La Giudecca.

This black lock of hair, along with the dolce sound of your voice

will be my dananke, the coin which I ought to pay

the ferryman for my last voyage.

*

This relic-wise curl now remembers 

how I bowed down to you

just in front of the Palazzo Mocenigo to say:

I experience your beauty like a child

to whom someone tells beautiful stories.

This relic-wise curl now remembers how

I kneeled down before the Madonna and kissed

her floral votives, her golden radiance to confess:

C'est elle, c'est Mimi que j'aime.

I know we have just lived among the clouds.

I know we have danced just following 

the pure musicality of those names: 

Venetia, Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Canaletto...

Je vous aime. J'entends des cloches.

II

For you I was no more the 'Doctor Seraphic'

neither 'quel poeta Maria';

For you, my name was just a murmur

of an angelic choir caressing your lips...

Or maybe a blank musical score where

your hands of daydreaming pianist 

improvise blue sonatas of autumn.

Perhaps my name, for you, was only a sentiment

as was Venice to me, or something unutterable

like the smile of God.

Dites si les violettes sont arrivées.

*

Ah, from the voice of the barcaiolo

I glimpse the aroma of violettes.

When you play the piano in the penumbra

of your rosato-de-Istra home

All the acrid fog from the Gran Canal fades away.

even the pious face of Mary Magdalene

smiles in San Pietro de Castello.

For you, my name was only the golden susurration

of the wind upon the oleanders, the bell towers, 

The amorous cats at sundown.

Rainer, Renee, Orpheus, Seraphic, Maria...

I am listening (here in the angelic realms)

the echo of my name like the sonata

that someone plays in the penumbra

di una stanza rosa.

I say 'someone' because I hardly can tell

If you are Persephone, Aphrodite or Mimi...

Mio dolce amico

III

I forebode something eternal

when we stroll around the Campo San Polo.

I forebode something like the touch

of God on my elegies.

I am no longer feeling oppressed by the scirocco

the noisy ragazzi playing tug-of-war

nor by the sad paleness of the sheets

hanging on the balconies

suddenly galloping along the wind

like the white horses of Apollo.

Inebriated by the aroma of

pomegranates, tamarisks, palm trees,

sheltered in the shade of your voice

nearly breeze, andiamo per la fodere

and forebode something divine.

I have no more the melancholy of that lion

sitting at the feet of the Cross

in the Scuola di San Marco...

La contemplation du soleil

sur la Piazza de San Marco

t'avait fait te precipiter à la maison

pour me voir.

When we walk along a dark salizzada

and your cupped hands brimming with rainwater 

Quench the thirst of black cats and stray ghosts

I foresee that I already own the immense time

of all the universes possible to be loved.

Never the hostile gaze of Fugacity.

You are my most accomplished Ding-Gedicht.

I forebode that I will never suffer afresh

from the everlasting exile of those

who were born in No Man's Land.

*

Within an hour, in La Riva,

We will be watching the full moon.

And we'll see walking over the waters 

not the Virgin but the deer with a golden necklace

coming from the woods of Senlis

just to smell the fragrance of your hair,

and the deer furtively will approach

to your hands illumined by the moon

and tamed will drink rainwater and tears of joy.

And you will sing to him old ballads

in Venetian dialect, like the Virgin to the licorne.

And you will read at last, in a stupor,

the inscription on the golden necklace:

"Anno 1037, Mimi Romanelli hoc me donavit."

The deer will run away

vanishing into a blue fog. 

Voulez vous aller a la maison du Lido?

I y aura de roses.

IV

The aroma of grappa, peaches, sardines...

The aroma of your body flowering

like a white lotus at sunrise.

A solitary cat wandering near the beach

under this azure calm of autumn.

And there goes Goethe, like a child, collecting

multicoloured shells and pebbles.

And there, Gaspara Stampa, donna ideale, melancholy,

walking towards the sun-kissed horizon.

I am here perfumed by the locks

of your hair in my hand 

and the incessant foam of waves.

I wanted to be a dragon and not an anemone.

I wanted to have the strength of a monster

and not this fragility of the white rose.

You recompose my selfhood in one piece again.

My selfhood ripped in thousands of lost homelands.  

"You made a lute of me. Now you are the hands

that play it by the sea. Orphean melodies."

The aroma of grappa, peaches, sardines.

I am here, resuscitated, in your arms

under this azure serenity

in the island of Lido.

 

THE WHITE LILY

 

She saw him walking along Piccadilly with a white lily in one hand and a gold-headed Malacca stick in the other; some shiny pearls of rain on his green velvet jacket and some stains of tobacco like patches in his yellow kid gloves. 

He smiled back at every handsome boy who beamed at him. The clouds gathering above seemed to be perfectly aligned with his actual mood: they were lilac, his favourite colour. But a groundswell of loud protests, insults and laughs was the staple for his daily stroll around Piccadilly and Regent's Street. At times, someone hurled rotten eggs, soiling his brown breeches, or a conker, like a projectile, that got lodged in the tangle of his long mane. That was a staple too, plus some people from some balconies shouting out loud: "You ponce and sodomite!" or something even far beyond pale. But he never lost his snazzy aplomb. "The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel," he used to mutter to himself, a quote from The Green Carnation, while wincing ahead to Rupert Street. There he stopped, puffing up cigarette after cigarette, plumes of lazy smoke that smelt of liquorice and mint.

One of the handsome boys loitering, in a suit of blue serge and straw hat trimmed with a red and blue ribbon, approached him. He produced a silver cigarette case from a pocket, as if a magic trick. That was enough; that was the code. Everything was already said without a single word. The next stop would be simply getting pissed with champagne at the Crown pub and coupled under the sheets in a sordid hotel room in Soho. 

"What is your name, sunshine?" 

"Alphonse"

"What a pretty name you have! It's worthy of fiction."

"Maybe I am just that, Sir, a fictional 'cinaedus' from a Roman past."

"You really talk smart for being a Piccadilly renter."

"I was an Oxonian, Sir, and I know my bits of Greek and Latin." 

She saw them now heading for Soho and how he lodged the white lily, brimful of raindrops, into the red ribbon of Alphonse's.

hat. The rain, though a drizzle, was soaking his blue serge suit. 

"Let's go, sunshine! Priapus is calling."

She followed them, sheltered by a big red umbrella and the surging fog. Started to cry. Rather a nervous sob. "So it is true," she said, mumbling through the tears that streamed down her turquoise dress. "I am no more his Irish sylph of violet eyes and auburn hair who protects his soul from creditors and philistines." Finally, wiping her eyes with a lace handkerchief, diffusing a mix of vetiver and opoponax aroma, she regained the poise of female dignity and called for a hamson cab. The clouds gathering above seemed to be clashing with her present state of mind: she hated lilac. "We are not going to rule the world as he promised, I with my beauty, he with his wits," she murmured, rather like whispering sweet nothings, although she was crying, crying rivers of pure desolation inside the hamson cab. She also kept white lilies in a blue vase at home. Fresh lilies he gave her each morning. The cab rattled along the cobbled road, its wheels as trembling as her own hands.

©Guido Reni, David, 1605

Ufizzi Gallery

VALERY IN LOVE

On the night of 4-5 October, 1892, in Genoa, Paul Valéry swore that never would he love anyone, at least not like that, the first time in Montpellier, when he was just a lad turning eighteen, and fell under the bewitchment of a "gracieuse Montpelliéraine".

Madame de Rovira was a Catalan widow, 37 years old. Valery called her 'la petite comtesse", though she was really a baroness. When he saw her for the first time, in the summer of 1889, it was like falling in love with the Sylvie of Gerard de Nerval or the Châteaubriand's sylph suddenly reincarnated in Madame de Rovira. Totally spellbound and desperate, he asked his friend Pierre Louys for advice. Louys, despite being as young as Valéry, was already an erotomaniac, taking photos of all his lovers in the nude with his Kodak. However, the virgin Valéry rather loved the "chimeric", the "imaginary" of the woman, not her tangible voluptuousness.

This infatuation was a disaster for his emotional and mental stability: 

"I've lost my beautiful and pristine vision of the world. I am an exile of myself." "I made myself an enemy of the Tender with all the strengths of my desperate tenderness."

That's why on that night, in Genoa, he made the decision to renounce love forever. A classic romantic night with a thunderstorm and flash of lightning. After all, he'd only loved a ghost, and "plus beaux sont nos fantômes que nous mêmes".

*

Yet, in the winter of 1938, Valery fell madly in love afresh, this time not with a chimaera or "fantôme" but a tangible, voluptuous woman. He was 67 years old, already a renowned poet and bourgeois-wise happy, married with children and grandchildren. Jeanne Voilier, by contrast, was 34, single, a successful lawyer, a business woman and an average novelist. Valery hadn't written a line of poetry for nearly twenty years and felt himself exhausted, finished, smoking 60 fags a day with excruciating stomach pains relieved with bismuth and belladonna, struggling with insomnia and addiction to opium. 

Jeanne Voilier, namely, became another drug to wind down his ailments with her legs of walkyrie and rubenesque hips and "a rose that is also a ruby hidden between her wide-open thighs". A lustful addiction that lasted until the last leg of his life, when he hardly could gather strength to write verses, thoughts in school notebooks under the title "Sub signo doloris". Even so, he had sufficient time to morph Jeanne Voilier into Lust, "la demoiselle de cristal", in his play Mon Faust.

From a steadfast misogynist and "enemy of the tender", Paul Valery turned into an old man with an infinite need of tenderness. He referred to Jeanne as "mon harmonique tendre" or "ma petite connette cherie". From not writing a single line in years to suddenly churning out more than 150 poems for Jeanne. The "Eros énergumène" had seized hold of him. His obsession with Jeanne Voilier went so overboard that he ended up suggesting they could write an epistolary novel together, where Valery would be the female character, that is, the heroine (perhaps the "belle dame sans merci"). What a magnificent irony: a stalwart misogynist who hated the novel as a literary genre, winding up as a heroine in a kind of sentimental roman. 

Valery passed away, in love, on 20 July, 1945. Curiously, a furious thunderstorm with lightning also resounded all over Paris. Doctor Gutmann, who was beside his bed, assured that he saw the last and powerful breath of the poet arising to Heaven... or maybe to Hell.

JACK LONDON AND THE MELANCHOLY OF MATERIALISM

Jack London wrote 210 short stories, and one of the last was Kanaka Surf, probably written in Hawaii in the summer of 1916, just the year of his death. By this time, it was Charmian Kittredge London who revised, corrected and typed everything her husband put on paper. Probably she really authored some of them, including Kanaka Surf. Certainly, since the publication of Martin Eden (1909), a change in London's narrative style has already been noteworthy. The Marxist and Neo-Darwinist writer seemed a thing of the distant past when novels like The Call of the Wild and White Fang made him the highest-paid writer of his time. One of the most telling changes in Jack London's philosophy is in his concept of the feminine. Before knowing Charmian, the woman in his work was a mere object of greed, her value compared to those of dogs, rifles, furs and whisky. In that world which he depicted so well of soulless men seeking gold and power, the native woman is only worthwhile to cook and procreate. Charmian was just the antithesis of that kind of woman: very independent, a forerunner of feminism, a photographer and exceptional swimmer and Amazon. On top of that, she was an accomplished pianist and used to play Liszt and Chopin while London wrote his novels. 

*

On November 19, 1905, Jack and Charmian got married in Chicago. Charmian paid for all the expenses of the honeymoon in Jamaica and Cuba. In 1907, they were determined to go around the world in their yacht, Snark, but they only reached Australia after visiting Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Bora Bora and Solomon Islands, Hawaii. It was during this long nautical pilgrimage, which lasted more than a year, when London finished Martin Eden (his best novel). A travel that changed his literary style and conception of the world. From being materialistic to becoming a theosophist.

*

It is on the seaside of Waikiki, in Honolulu, where the plot of Kanaka Surf unfolds: Lee Barton (a projection of London himself) and Ida Barton (a projection of Charmian) are a superman and a superwoman happily married for twelve years, both exceptional swimmers and surfers who have decided to challenge the monstrous Kanaka Surf. Her revealing swimsuit shows her naked legs, a spectacular body summoning the envious and frown-upon glances of holidaymakers, with the only exception of a married couple of sculptors, who take pleasure in moulding such a perfect body with the imagination. Both Lee and Ida take on the Kanaka Surf and succeed in riding it, leaving jaw-dropped to the expert natives that feared the worst. All was running smoothly in their lives until Sonny Grandison turned up. He was a swarthy and virile Hawaiian, educated at Harvard, a scientist and captain of a polo team. Every night party on the seaside, Ida chose Sonny as her dance partner, so Lee ended up suffering bouts of sheer jealousy. Dried out for a long time, only drinking orange juice, he was again off the waggon with a lot of whisky and opium, suffering all night long paranoid delusions wherein he asked himself if the woman, in truth, was an immoral creature, beholden to the Devil, as she is described by the German pessimists, that is, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. One morning, the couple decided to challenge the Kanaka Surf again; however, this time, Lee wanted to prove if Ida really loved him, and, already on top of the gigantic and foamy crest, he pretended having cramps in the legs, floundering, struggling not to get sucked by the water and drown. If Ida doesn't love me, he thought, she will let me die. If she does, I will be safe, or we'll die together. Well, the ending does nothing to do with whatever the German pessimists did think... The true event that inspired Jack London to write this short story was to see, while surfing in Waikiki, that Charmian was capable of riding a big wave several times, whereas he was already done for, doomed, just turning 40 (Charmian was 45). Already seriously ill with uremia. dysentery, rheumatic feet, nephritic colic, terrible headaches and acute melancholy. "A splendid ruin of a man," so he defined himself, a far cry from being that superman Lee riding the waves, swimming like a dolphin and fucking like a satyr.

*

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (another alcoholic and aquatic writer) believed that all the Americans were born with fins, or maybe they were born just as they are, so the money is a kind of fin. In the case of Jack London, he was striking rich but had lost his fins in Honolulu that last summer of his life. By then he only believed in reincarnation and in the mysterious power of myths and dreams, as a good reader of Blavatsky and Jung. The last words he said to Charmian, a little before his last breath: "Thanks, God, that you are not afraid of anything." That night he fell asleep reading a book by James W. Page about a trip to Cape Horn. He didn't wake up again, at least in this world. 

   

   

ELIOT, VIVIEN AND THE WASTE LAND

 

On April 24, 1915, a young American poet, Thomas Stearns Eliot, struck up a relationship with a young English girl from a well-to-do family who used to haunt famous bookshops and, above all, to dance "like a faun" every Saturday in the Savoy. To Eliot the names of the English girls sounded very amusing: Phyllis, Ottoline, and Vivien.

Vivien, or Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was the daughter of a Victorian artist who made his fortune painting sentimental landscapes. She lived with her parents in Hampstead in a massive house with twelve rooms and a tennis court. Two months later, on June 26, Eliot and Vivien tied the knots discreetly. Eliot confessed to his brother Henry: I love her simply because I want to burn my ships and stay in England. They spent the honeymoon in the Landsdowne Hotel in Eastbourne. It was seemingly a disaster. April used to be the cruellest month for those who, like Eliot, cannot dance.

Seven years later, Eliot published The Waste Land, probably the most famous and misunderstood poem of the century. Incidentally, seven years lasted the metamorphosis of Tiresias into a woman:

"I, Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

old man with wrinkled female breasts"

And, according to Eliot's notes on The Waste Land, Tiresias holds the key to the whole poem. He also was torn between two lives, two identities. Vivien tittered in two minds too, or else several minds. Actually, in 1936, when she was already insane, she adopted three identities: Daisy Miller, a nurse called Gordon and Cataline the Great. Eliot profoundly distrusted the feminine and detested "the female stench". Ironically, he ended up living as a nurse looking after his wife, always bedridden with neuralgia, colitis, neuritis, migraine, damaged liver, insomnia, anxiety... By that time, Eliot could not know that Vivien suffered what the psychiatrists called today "Munchausen syndrome". Neither did he know until 1925 that his wife was anorexic and a drug addict for many years. However, on the positive side, Vivien showed off her charms as a flapper muse: an outstanding dancer, exquisite taste for books and a very good reader of poetry, with a critical eye and a quick ear for the cockney. Her contribution was capital to the final version of The Waste Land. Vivien was his muse, although a sick and unfaithful muse, because besides dancing, Vivian also craved to be desired. Unfortunately, Eliot, unlike his friend Ezra Pound, was not a regular student of the Kama-sutra.

*

Vivien started to dally with the Welsh philosopher Bertrand Russell, a pacifist and staunch supporter of "free love", such a kind samaritan that offered to the Eliots his flat in London. Russell, a renowned philanderer, wanted to take Vivien to bed in sooth. "Bertie is all over me," complained Vivien, though she was really enjoying the situation, even more if Bertie treated her with expensive jewels and silk knickers. "We have here a kind of ménage à trois, more or less," said Vivien, who frequented, three times a week, a basement lounge in Carnaby Street, Soho, to take dance classes (paid for by Bertie). She danced there and danced with a very short black skirt. Bertie and Eliot used to come over oftentimes. The dance teacher called them "darling". In those days, Tom Eliot hardly ever wrote a line of poetry, earning his bacon as a schoolmaster in Highgate. He owned up to his brother Henry that, many times, he believed "Prufrock" was his swangsong. At least, he promised himself to learn dancing that "Negro rag-time" as well as Vivien in the Savoy or in the Elysee Galleries.

An utter hell; that was the blunt conclusion of Bertrand Russell about his fleeting affair with Vivien Eliot. Curiously, Eliot weighed up that same conclusion about his marriage: "I have been boiled in hell-broth," he said to Virginia Woolf in 1925 when the doctors had already identified the cause of Vivien's everlasting ailments: her addiction to chloral hydrate, a hypnotic anti-depressant that can damage irreversibly the liver, apart from causing gastritis, convulsions, dizziness, stomachaches, etc.

In the last ten years, Eliot had turned, gradually and deliberately, into a machine of no feelings, a machine that had killed Vivien alive. He had become the banker Tom, hard-working in a lugubrious office from 9 to 5, then arrived home, shattered to bits, with just the sap to read a little, tend her nearly invalid wife, who demanded punctually a hot water bottle at ten. Hence these verses in 'A Game of Chess': 

'What shall I do now? What shall I do?

I shall rush out as I am and walk the street

with my hair down, so.     

What shall we do tomorrow?

What shall we ever do?

The hot water at ten"

At the end of 1921, Eliot slumped in a depression so crippling that he had to leave his work at Lloyds Bank for several months. He went first to rest in Margate and later to Lausanne, Switzerland, for psychiatric treatment. It was in both places where, playing the mandoline, Eliot got the final élan to craft the poem that made him famous, The Waste Land:

"By the water of Leman I sat down and wept...

*

In a rather cryptic essay on Dante, Eliot posited the idea that the Vita Nova was a manual of sexual psychology. One should affirm the same idea about The Waste Land, an erudite and poetic testimony about a conjugal humiliation. Lyrical and blinding flashes of an armour hiding someone who yearns to be natural and authentic, lest he cannot be a great lover. "I don't know yet what the core is, the egg of things," confessed Eliot, always torn between the stringent Protestant ethics of the Unitary Church and savage, metic soul. He couldn't dump Vivien to the river like a dead animal, but he didn't want either to renounce his secret soul of a Sweeney with homoerotic or even pornographic penchants. "I never lay with a woman I liked, loved or even felt any strong physical attraction to," said Eliot in 1939 when Vivian was already admitted to a mental asylum. This homoerotic impulse came to surface, for example, in Mr Eugenides of The Fire Sermon: a merchant of Smyrna, unshaven, with the pockets full of Corinth raisins, invites the poet to a weekend in the Metropole (a luxurious hotel in Brighton, well known by then for his gay and loose atmosphere). It's clear that, after seven years of marriage, the poet is feeling wasted and intellectually barren and diagnoses himself as neurasthenic. His sinister and gloomy gaze terrorised Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell called him mockingly "the undertaker".

*

"Complimenti, you bitch," wrote Ezra Pound to Eliot from Paris on February 24, 1922, just the day Tom gave the last touch to The Waste Land. Even so, he was not completely sure the poem would work. On April 20, Eliot told Sydney Schiff that he was ready to abandon poetry and literature. That same April, Vivien had been in bed for eight weeks with psychotic delusions. Tom was also on the verge of another suicidal depression. April is becoming the cruellest month afresh. Fortunately, his father-in-law paid him for a sojourn in the hotel in Bristol in Lugano, near the village called Paradiso. There, Eliot got over quickly, quaffing red wine Barolo and Asti Spumante, enjoying an Italian-Swiss festival at the lake with night fireworks. "I should like six months of Italy and heat and sunshine and have never felt so lazy and languid. " And, to top his feeling of bliss, he met Hermann Hess, who, by this time, lived in Montagnola, writing Siddhartha. His marriage was in tatters, but Eliot, loyal to the Unitarian faith, nursed his sick 'Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks' until 1932, when, taking advantage of a trip to the United States, he decided to separate for good 

VIA QUERINI, VENICE, !972

 

Some wench with eyes of jackal

digs deep into the ruins of my name,

burrowing along the debris of my brain,

A wench with greengage-bosoms

sniffing deep in my ashes

arising me from the dead with a kiss

and gone

He is about to give up his ghost

his last breath           nearly

to become a dense mist shrouding La Giudecca.

Ezra Pound  melancholy stares

the little finger of Olga Rudge

(tiny little fingers couleur de rose).

There she is as always for the last ten years

near the carcass of the old poet

who lies down in bed by the window

overlooking the canalside, mumbling

snippets of his Pisan Cantos

while the shadows of gondoliers

sing Puccini arias out loud

louder         the seagulls hovering

over the isle of San Michele,

the belfry of San Giorgio Maggiore

like birds of ill-omen.

The pearly wench, Hebe, has made me

immortal with a kiss

and gone...

.     The Canale Della Giudecca

       J. M. Turner

       ©Tate Britain

L'INCONNUE DE LA SEINE

"Le Seine parle tout le temps, tout le temps du suicide"

(Louis Aragon)

September 1906. When living in Paris the poet Rainer Maria Rilke used to stop over the shop of the mouleur Lorenzi, in the quartier de l'Odeon.

There hung on the display window death masks of Mozart, Cromwell, Dante, Keats, Napoleon... But the brooding poet was rather obssessed on contemplating just one: the mask of a girl with no name, a Jane Doe smiling "as if she knew". It is well known the Rilke's fascination for women from the Madonnas painted by the Venetian masters to the greengrocers in the street market on the Giudecca. Rilke, by then, was  still outlining the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge where he bestowed on the girl-mask an halo of mystery, " because she was so beautiful deceitfully smiling, as if she knew..."

Who was that girl? Nobody knows so far and probably we'll never know. Legend has it that, by the close of the XIX century, a young woman was found dead floating in the Seine near the quay of Louvre. She was taken to the Paris Morgue, behind Notre-Dame, where a coroner, smitten with her smiling face, decided to cast it in plaster as a death mask. Some people recognised in her hairstyle a peasant or a tramp. Others assured she was a Hungarian star of music hall, murdered by her Parisian lover. The Lorenzi's heirs-who still run the business- affirm that the mask was taken from a beautiful model in some atelier, and it is technically impossible to mould it from the face of a drowned person.

And so the myth of this Parisian Ophelia was born. It didn't take long to be worshipped as a post-romantic muse, giving rise to a massive amount of novels, poems, plays, movies, photography books.

The first time she became a literary character was in "The Worshipper of the Image(1900) by Richard Le Gallienne, a decandent British novelist. The last time, in the Guillaume Musso' s novel L'inconnue de la Seine(2021).

Albert Camus called her "the Giaconde of Suicide" , and according to Al Alvarez, during the roaring twenties and the dawning of the thirties almost all the students in Europe had a copy of the death mask as a kind of pin-up girl. A whole generation of German women became inspired by "la Inconnue de la Seine" as the archetypical model of female beauty. Even Nabokov, in 1934, wrote an exquisite poem morphing her into a kind of the 'neznakomka' of Blok and the Shakesperean Ophelia. Anais Nin recalled her briefly in "Houseboat"(1944), and Jules Supervielle clearly drew inspiration from this drowned muse to write his dreamlike story 'L'enfant de la haute mer".

For the publishing of his comedy, L'Eglise(1933), Celine sent not his photo required by the editor but a snapshot of 'L'inconnue de la Seine'. The editor got so incensed that nearly cancelled the contract.

But the best book ever written about this subject is Aurélien by Louis Aragon, a long novel appeared in 1944. A beautiful love story and a cultural kaleidoscope of those years amidst the carnage of WWI. Aurélien is a young womanizer, freshly demobbed, who fell in love with Bérénice, a provincial girl married to a pharmacist, despite she's not his type of woman, not even a beauty. Charles Swann, in the Proust's novel, fell head over heels in love with Odette de Crécy because she reminded him of Botticelli. Aurélien fell madly in love with Berenice when she closed her eyes, because her face reminded him of the smiling mask of L'inconnue... He also hung a copy of the famous mask in his room.

Bérénice, in a fit of jealousy, tore the mask into pieces trying, besides, to break something else: the enchantment, the malignant attraction this unknown woman is able to spell from death. 

Nowadays, 'l'Inconnue de la Seine' is the most kissed woman in the world, because her face was taken as the model for Resusci Anne, the mannequin normally used for CPR, that is, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

©Jeanne Moreau et L'inconnue de la Seine