L’Inconnue de la Seine (French for “the unknown woman of the Seine”) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artist 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 in Paris around the late 1880s.

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. 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.

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.”

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This death mask of an anonymous women inspired legions of literary writers, each of which rambled on about its beautiful expression and the mystery behind the smile. It became a fashionable talking/reference point of some sort and I guess it validated their vision of the poetic life.

This link has a detailed outline of artists, writers and philosophers who were inspired by the mask. Some of whom include Albert Camus, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anais Nin and Maurice Blanchot.

Some other pictures of the mask: