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There's a good chance you've made out with a drowning victim from the 1800s
(Thread, non-sweary version here: https://bit.ly/2WoJUUh )
(Thread, non-sweary version here: https://bit.ly/2WoJUUh )
You may not have heard of l'Inconnue de la Seine but there's a good chance you've kissed her on the mouth, in a manner of speaking.
In the late 1880s, a body was discovered drowned in the Seine in Paris. Nobody really knows what happened to her, though it's speculated that it was by suicide. More importantly, nobody knew who she was either.
Unlike today where their face might make the papers and she would be identified in that way, in France from around 1881 they would take your corpse and place it in a window of a chilled room and people would gawp at your lifeless body like a pasty in Greggs.
Should anyone recognise you they say something along the lines of "I'll take that one to go" like you would if Greggs had table service.
The windows were weirdly popular, in ways that were disproportionate to the number of people who were missing loved ones. “There is not a single window in Paris that attracts more onlookers than this," according to a volume of engravings Unknown Paris.
Don't judge them too harshly, entertainment was thin on the ground back them, for instance, not one of them had yet watched Disney's Ratatouille.
Of all the people that stared at the unknown girl , not one of them knew who she was. She was placed in a pauper's grave, but not before one last creep took something from her; her face.
It's not known why the pathologist at the mortuary decided to make a death mask of her, though the popular story goes that he was so entranced by her beauty that he couldn't help himself, which is a good indicator that they probably shouldn't work in a mortuary.
"Where's Remy gone?"
"Remy? Oh you mean the fucking creep, yeah he's taking another cast of a corpse he's got the hots for. I'd fire him, but he's just so goddamn good at window displays."
"Remy? Oh you mean the fucking creep, yeah he's taking another cast of a corpse he's got the hots for. I'd fire him, but he's just so goddamn good at window displays."
For whatever reason the cast was made, it was bizarrely popular when masks made from it went on sale. People could just not get enough of this dead girl's face.
It was popular among artists and writers alike, and stories were written based around L'Inconnue de la Seine (the unknown woman of the Seine) inventing backstories for her and why she chose to drown herself. Normal.
The mask became something that everybody needed to have, like a Furby in the 90s except it was a corpse's face.
There was even a horror story based around the mask where it goes on to kill a bunch of people, which is pretty much the opposite of what it would eventually do.
Her face endured for decades, when in the 1950s a toy manufacturer - Asmind S. Laerdal - whacked it onto a soft plastic doll named Anne, meaning people could now squish as well as just glance at her dead face.
As chance would have it, Laerdal's own son had nearly drowned when he was 2. When in the mid-50s Dr. Peter Safar came up with a method of resuscitation involving mouth to mouth and chest compressions, he went to Laerdal for help to teach it around the world.
Laerdal leapt at the chance, and together they worked on a lifelike (well, ish) doll you've probably pressed your lips against at some point or another if you've ever done any kind of first aid training; the Resusci Anne.
And that's why, hundreds of years after her death, she continues to get the most action of any corpse we know about to date.
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