[UA] L’Inconnue de la Seine

[John Tynes]

 From the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society comes this  
interesting story, but the ending is where it jumps the tracks into  
UA-land:

> In 1900, the body of an unidentified young woman, an apparent  
> suicide, was pulled from the river Seine in Paris. Enchanted by the  
> mysterious corpse’s beauty, a morgue worker made a plaster cast of  
> the woman’s face. Copies of this “drowned Mona Lisa,” as Camus  
> would later describe her, soon proliferated across Paris, appearing  
> first in the city’s salons and finally in its literature. Nabokov  
> wrote a poem titled “L’Inconnue de la Seinne.” Rilke mentioned her  
> in his only novel. Man Ray photographed her. A character in Louis  
> Aragon’s novel Aurélien tries to resurrect her.
> In the The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Al Alvarez writes, “I am  
> told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on  
> her… the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot  
> was for the 1950s.”
> In 1958, the Inconnue was used as the model for the face of Rescue  
> Annie, a popular CPR training mannequin still in use today. Hers is  
> perhaps the most kissed face of all time.

http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/2007/07/31/linconnue-de-la-seine/

-- 
John Scott Tynes
Gracey's Mansion
http://www.jstynes.com/gm/


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