The Most Kissed Girl in The World: The Mona Lisa of The Seine

Sometime in the late 19th century, the body of a young woman was fished out of the Seine River in Paris. Because there was no evidence of violence upon her, it was assumed that she had taken her own life. This was nothing new. On average, some two hundred people are pulled out of Seine’s murky water each year by Paris's river police. At least a quarter of them are corpses, and nearly half of those pulled out are people attempting suicide. Young women make up the biggest proportion of suicides. In those days, when an identified body was recovered, it was laid on a marble slab and propped up against the morgue window for the public to view, in the hope that someone will recognize it. Death and punishment were once popular forms of entertainment in Europe, and this macabre display of corpses drew everyone—from young to old—to the morgue. But nothing captured the imagination of Parisians that year, and the century that followed, like the suicide of this mysterious and beautiful young woman. The story goes that the pathologist on duty became so entranced by her beauty that he had a plaster cast of her face made. Before long, the white plaster cast of the unknown woman with a Mona Lisa smile started appearing in shops throughout Paris, and in the following years, copies of the mask became a fixture in all fashionable Bohemian homes across Europe. The mask’s enigmatic smile bewitched artists, poets and novelists, and over the decades dozens of poems were written and stories invented to give the young woman an identity . In Richard Le Gallienne's 1900 novella The Worshipper of the Image , an English poet falls in love with the mask, eventually leading to the death of his daughter and the suicide of his wife. The 1936 German movie Die Unbekannte, about an orphan who was seduced by a rich lover and then abandoned leading to her suicide, was inspired by this death mask.