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 …
I know that fruit falls to the wind that shakes it,
that birds lose their feathers and flowers their fragrance,
that Creation is a great wheel
that cannot move without crushing someone;
Months, days, billows of the sea, eyes that weep
pass under the blue sky;
grass must grow and children die;
I know it, O God!
In your heavens, above the sphere of the clouds,
deep in that still, sleeping blue,
perhaps you are making unknown things
where Man’s pain is an ingredient.
Perhaps it is useful in your numberless plans
that charming creatures
go away, carried off by the dark whirlwind
of black events.
Anja Zeidler points out, Snopes-like, that not everyone accepted the story behind the Iconnue. The obvious launching point for debate is that the plaster used to make the mask recorded not a trace of the wrinkles that the loathsome river would surely carve on the features of a victim in its embrace. The Lorenzi family of model-makers, in business on the Seine’s left bank for a century and a half, still sells Inconnue masks, and its experts insist she couldn’t have died from drowning — the face is completely unlined, so much so that the model was likely no more than 16 years old.
One researcher, Zeidler learned from other sources, visited a German factory that made many of the Inconnue plaster casts for tourists and found the model for them — the factory owner’s daughter — very much alive.
Zeidler cites other possibilities: a music-hall artist of Hungarian descent who was murdered; a Russian named Valérie; and the model of an Paris artist whose studio in the rue Racine was almost certainly the “shop” that Rainer Maria Rilke mentioned in his novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”. The face in the mask he spotted in the window “was beautiful, because it smiled, smiled so deceptively, as though it knew”.
It was Albert Camus who evoked “the smile of a drowned Mona Lisa”, but long before him, in 1900, Briton Richard le Gallienne, who owned a copy of the death mask, wrote a novella called “The Worshipper of the Image” in which the protagonist becomes obsessed with its malevolent influence.
In the 1920s the Inconnue appeared in a pair of photo books on death masks published in Germany that were best-sellers, and French photographer Albert Rudomine took a picture of her in the same lighting he used for his portraits of actors. Those are the two more startling images reproduced in this post; when compared to the third, it’s clear that his talent enhanced her beauty.
In 1931 the poet Jules Supervielle, who also had a copy of the mask, gave the poor waif her name in his story “L’Inconnue de la Seine”, which was cleverly told from her point of view, even as she is borne by the river’s current toward the sea: “She travelled not knowing that on her face shone a trembling smile, far more unremitting than the smile of the living, which is always at the mercy of whatever may come.”
Then in 1934 came Reinhold Conrad Muschler’s “Die Unbekannte”, published in English two years later as “One Unknown”, a novella that, with the film version that followed, made the Iconnue practically a household name. Maudlin claptrap about a young innocent from the countryside who drowns herself after being wooed and then dumped by a rich British diplomat in Paris, the book sold extremely well.
Among other writers who cast their nets around her were Anais Nin, who alluded toher in the story “Houseboat”; Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote the poem “L’Inconnue de la Seine” in 1934; Claire Goll, in whose story “The Unknown of the Seine” a painter drops dead from a heart attack when he sees the mask in a shop near Notre Dame and believes it’s the face of his long-lost daughter; and Maurice Blanchot, who saw on her face “a smile so relaxed, so rich that one may be lead to believe that she died in a moment of extreme happiness”.
In 1933 the great Louis-Ferdinand Céline was supposed to submit a photograph of himself to his publisher to appear in a new collection, and instead sent a shot of the Inconnue. That’s reasonably surreal, and sure enough Anja Zeidler provides a link to the surrealists to go along with a mention of Giacometti — who certainly knew his faces and masks — being “enchanted” with the mystery woman.
In 1960 Man Ray gave Louis Aragon 15 photographs to illustrate a new edition of the latter’s 1944 novel “Aurélien”, and Aragon later said it had been Ray who actually “wrote” the novel, “playing in black and white with the mask of the Inconnue de la Seine”. In fairness, though, “Aurélien” was about yet another owner of one of the Inconnue masks struggling to find meaning in life between the world wars. He falls for another man’s wife and eventually notices “a dreamlike smile on her face, vague, irreal, following an interior image”.
Zeidler also cites Al Alvarez’s 1971 book “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide”: “I am told that a whole generation of German girls modelled their looks on her,” he wrote, and suggested that in her time she personified the same allure that Garbo and Bardot projected in their generations.
In 2002 the Musée d’Orsay hosted an exhibition of death masks that included the Inconnue, just as she remains on view full-time at the St John Ambulance Museum in London, an acknowledgement of the source of the CPR mannequin it uses to train heroes.
The final word, almost inevitably, comes from Asmund Laerdal, the designer of Resusci-Annie, the CPR dummy, or at least his company, which says that because the original model “has no name and remains an enigma, we can never reach her and taint her … we project our own dreams on to her”.
