Reborn from the river
Snopes.com, that trusted spoiler of urban myths, once tackled the (apparently) widespread belief that the face of the ubiquitous CPR training mannequin was based on that of its grieving designer’s dead daughter. Poignant! But the fact, now widely dispersed on the Net, is that the face belongs to “the girl who drowned in the Seine”.
It’s an even more poignant story, actually, and one that’s fairly well known, but it’s worth a return visit and a modicum of meditation. It certainly was for at least two generations of writers, though not always good writers.
The spiritually sublime visage of “the Inconnue de la Seine”, as the unfortunate young women came to be known in the absence of her true identity, was reproduced countless times at the beginning of the last century. Once, her wisp of a smile held the same fascination for tens of thousands of admirers that the Mona Lisa’s evokes.
The details of the case and its literary ramifications are ably recounted by Anja Zeidler on Steven Moore’s excellent tribute site to the American writer William Gaddis (1922-98), whose first novel, “The Recognitions” left book critics gasping for air at 900-odd words and a daunting array of allusions, including to the Iconnue.
Gaddis was following a long tradition of writers composing wreaths of words to mourn the mysterious woman whose body was carried into Paris Morgue sometime around 1900, or a decade or two earlier according to one onlooker who read in her hairstyle an earlier era as well as “a peasant girl, a poor shop girl, or that of a beggar or vagrant”.
The morgue at the time was at the eastern end of the Ile de la Cité next to Notre-Dame Cathedral, a spot I once visited to watch a chained-up Harry Houdini leap from the roof of the death house into the Seine. The morgue was a bona fide tourist attraction then, the big draw being the daily panoply of a dozen unidentified and unclaimed corpses on black marble slabs displayed hopefully in the window.
Among these cadavers was placed the young woman, so the story goes, and her haunting beauty so struck one of the morgue’s upcutters that he made a death mask. Copies of it were soon on sale, not just to medical students but the general public, and these were placed on view in many fine homes across the continent. The owners and their guests would gaze into the face and wonder who she was, how she ended up in the river, whether she was really smiling and, if so, why. (See a previous Dali House post about death masks here.)
Death in the Seine’s bosom has always been commonplace. Great rivers beckon the living. In the 18th century people ritually loosed little rafts of wood into Paris’ eternally romantic waterway for its victims, each bearing sanctified bread and a candle. In 2006, the Guardian has noted, 50 corpses were pulled from the Seine, another 146 rescued alive.
In his 1988 film “Death in the Seine”, Peter Greenaway shared the stories of 23 of the hundreds of people plucked from the river in six years spanning 1800. Most were women, it was noted, and most had drowned in April. The speculation was that male suicides preferred hanging, and that April was the direst month for the French capital’s females because it came nine months after summer, when so many unwanted pregnancies took root.
Here, one of the mementoes of a loved one that were common in the United States in the 1800s, snapshots of the just-deceased, the better to remember them. Another is elsewhere in this post.
On Sedulia Scott’s remarkable website Consolatio, a balm to the grieving, I found the touching story of Victor Hugo’s 19-year-old daughter, who drowned in the Seine in a boating accident in 1844. Hugo wrote several poems about her as he struggled to come to terms with his loss, including “At Villequier”, which begins: “Now that I am coming out, pale but victorious, from the mourning that darkened my soul …”
The poem, an appeal to God written four years after the tragedy, continues:
We never see but a single side of things;
the other plunges into the night of frightening mystery.
Man bears the yoke without knowing why.
All he sees is short, useless and fleeting … See the rest.
