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L’Inconnue de la Seine

L’ Inconnue de la Seine (1880) was an unidentified young woman, estimated to be 16 years old, whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists’ homes after 1900. Her visage was the inspiration for numerous literary works. According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine River at the Quai du Louvre in Paris around the late 1880s. The body showed no signs of violence, and suicide was suspected. A pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a moulder make a plaster cast death mask of her face. The identity of the girl was never discovered. In the following years, numerous copies were produced. The copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa, inviting numerous speculations as to what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society. The popularity of the figure is also of interest to the history of artistic media, relating to its widespread reproduction. The original cast had been photographed, and new casts were created back from the film negatives. These new casts displayed details that are usually lost in bodies taken from the water, but the apparent preservation of these details in the visage of the cast seemed to only reinforce its authenticity. Critic A. Alvarez wrote in his book on suicide, The Savage God: “I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her.” According to Hans Hesse of the University of Sussex, Alvarez reports, “the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s. He thinks that German actresses like Elisabeth Bergner modeled themselves on her. She was finally displaced as a paradigm by Greta Garbo.” The face of the unknown woman was used for the head of the first aid mannequin Rescue Annie. It was created by Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal in 1958 and was used starting in 1960 in numerous CPR courses. Therefore, the face has been called by some “the most kissed face” of all time.

 A number of writers fabricated fictions around her life and Man Ray even attempted a photographic resurrection, but to no avail, the puzzle remained intractable.

It was whilst in Buenos Aires, attending a conference dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges on The Myth of the Gaucho, that Dr. Harry Battley found this carte-de-visite in a junk shop. The face seemed familiar and on returning to London he referred to his copy of Das ewige Antlitz and confirmed that this was indeed the young woman found in the Seine. His curiosity roused, Battley determined to solve the mystery of her untimely death.

Two clues within the picture proved vital to his enquiry - the brooch worn by the woman and a contaminating fingerprint in the fabric of the photograph that had become more visible with time. Battley’s researches led him to the discovery that the setting had been designed by society jeweller Marcus Villard for a wealthy bon viveur named Roland Vittes. Battley visited Vittes’ elderly daughter, who rather naively permitted him access to her parents papers, amongst which he found a note from husband to wife, vehemently denying acquaintance with ‘the Hungarian woman Ewa Lazlo’.

Further enquiries confirmed that a music-hall artist of that name, whose description fitted the photograph, had performed at the Theatre de Funambules during the summer in question. Although the identity of L’inconnue seemed now to be established, the circumstances of her death were not.

Battley naturally began his investigations into the fingerprint at the records office of the Prefecture de Police in Paris but was disappointed to learn that they had not started taking prints until 1913. An unexpected piece of good fortune awaited his return to Argentina; records went back to 1894 and the print was matched to that of a convicted blackmailer, Louis Argon. It was Argon’s bad fortune that on fleeing France he should pick Buenos Aires, where the Croatian immigrant Juan Vucetich was already operating his comparative fingerprinting system within the police department. Dr. Battley asserts that Argon escaped the country after a failed attempt to blackmail Vittes about his liaison with the actress. The long held belief that L’Inconnue committed suicide now appears less likely than that she met her end at the hands of Louis Argon.

The records in Buenos Aires also reveal that Argon was murdered in the last year of the century, knifed in a bar-room brawl by a gaucho.