L'Inconnue de la Seine
from wikipedia
According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine River in Paris around the end of the 19th century. The body showed no signs of violence, and suicide was suspected. A worker at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face. According to other accounts, the mask was taken from the daughter of a mask manufacturer in Germany, or from a model in a studio in Paris.[1]
In the following years, numerous copies were produced, and these copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others have compared her smile to that of Mona Lisa, and there were numerous speculations on what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.
"Elle allait sans savoir que sur son visage brillait un sourire tremblant mais plus résistant qu'un sourire de vivante, toujours à la merci de n'importe quoi" ("She traveled 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,"
-Jules Supervielle (1884-1960)
here she is next to a photo of anais nin
Critic A. Alvarez writes in 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."[2]
http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/inconnue/index.shtml