"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
