Legend has it that around 1880, the corpse of a beautiful young girl was found on the banks of the Seine (her age was estimated at 16 for extra drama). There were no signs of violence on the girl's body, and her face looked suspiciously serene. So the Stranger from the Seine was born.
The unfortunate drowned woman was so beautiful that an impressionable pathologist made her a death mask (later, plaster copies of this mask became an indispensable attribute of fashionable Parisian living rooms). The peaceful expression on the girl's face was attributed to the fact that she committed suicide, perhaps because of unhappy love, and did not become a victim of violence.
The saddest detail of this whole story was that no one missed the girl. She remained forever the nameless Stranger from the Seine.
Having lived serenely throughout the 20th century, the legend of the Stranger gained a second wind thanks to the Internet. Information has appeared on the Web that the identity of the Stranger has been established. The attention of researchers was attracted by an old photograph, which depicts a girl very similar to a drowned woman from the Seine. I even managed to find out her name - Eva Laszlo. She allegedly was a Hungarian adventurer and died at the hands of her jealous partner.
Soon, however, this version was called erroneous. The photo of “Eva Laszlo” shows the manipulations of the Photoshop masters of the early 20th century (the photo of the face of a plaster mask is clumsily inserted into the photo of another lady, and eyes are drawn on the closed eyelids in the best traditions of the post-mortem genre).
In modern France, another version of the origin of the Stranger is popular, which in this moment and is considered the main one.
Famous french artist XIX century Jules Lefebvre was a real connoisseur female beauty and master female portrait. Around 1875, according to his own recollections, he made the famous plaster mask from the face beautiful girl, who died of tuberculosis (according to other sources, from opium poisoning, which, however, does not deny the presence of tuberculosis in her). The unfortunate woman was his model. Lefevre did not leave the name of the model in his memoirs. The stranger in this version is true to her nameless nickname.
The stranger left an involuntary mark not only on the canvas famous painter. Albert Camus compared the stranger's smile with enigmatic smile Gioconda, the image of the Stranger is mentioned in Rilke's novel "The Notebook of Malte Laurid's Bridge", and Vladimir Nabokov wrote the poem "L" inconnue de la Seine "in 1934:
Hurrying the denouement of this life,
not loving anything on earth,
I keep looking at the white mask
your lifeless face.
In addition, in the 50s of the XX century, the image of the Stranger was used by a certain Asmund Aerdap to create modular training mannequins. These mannequins are still used for first aid training.
The mannequin was called "Rescued Annie", so, one might say, the Stranger got some kind of name.
The first of the children, who saw something dark and incomprehensible approaching the shore across the sea, imagined that it was an enemy ship. Then, not seeing any masts or flags, they thought it was a whale. But when an unknown object was thrown onto the sand and they cleaned it of entangling algae, jellyfish tentacles, fish scales and shipwrecks that it carried on itself, then they realized that it was a drowned man.
They had been playing with it all day long, burying it in the sand and digging it out again, when one of the adults accidentally saw them and alarmed the whole village. The men who carried the drowned man to the nearest house noticed that he was heavier than all the dead they had seen, almost as heavy as a horse, and thought that perhaps the sea had carried him too long and the bones were soaked with water. When they lowered him to the floor, they saw that he was much larger than any of them, so much larger that he could hardly fit in the house, but they thought that perhaps some drowned people tend to continue to grow even after death. The smell of the sea emanated from him, and due to the fact that the body was enveloped in a shell of shells and mud, only the outlines suggested that this was a human corpse.
It was enough to clean his face to see that he was not from their village. In the village they had at most two dozen shacks knocked together from boards, near each courtyard - bare stones on which not a flower grew - and these houses were scattered at the tip of a desert cape. Because there was very little land, mothers never for a moment left the fear that the wind might carry away their children; and the few dead that the years brought had to be thrown from the steep cliffs of the coast. But the sea was calm and generous, and all the men of the village fit into seven boats, so that when a drowned man was found, it was enough for anyone to look at the others, and he immediately knew if everyone was there.
Nobody went out to sea that evening. While the men found out if they were looking for someone in neighboring villages, the women took care of the drowned man. With tufts of Spanish gorse, they wiped off the mud, picked out the remnants of algae from their hair, and with scrapers, which clean the fish from scales, tore off the shells from it. While doing this, they noticed that the sea plants on him were from distant oceans and deep waters, and his clothes were torn to shreds, as if he were swimming through labyrinths of coral. They also noticed that he endures death with proud dignity - on his face there was no expression of loneliness, characteristic of those who drowned in the sea, but there was also no repulsive expression of torment written on the faces of those who drowned in the river. But it wasn't until they cleaned it completely that they realized what it was like, and it took their breath away. He was the tallest, the strongest, the best built and the most courageous man what they have seen in their lives, and even now, already dead when they first looked at him, he did not fit in their imagination.
For him, there was not a bed in the village on which he could fit, nor a table that could support him. He did not fit even the festive pants of the most tall men villages, nor the Sunday shirts of the fattest, nor the shoes of the one who stood firmer than the others on the ground. Fascinated by his beauty and exorbitant size, the women, so that he could live in death with a proper look, decided to sew him pants from a large piece of slanting sail, and a shirt from Dutch linen, from which shirts for brides are sewn. Women sewed, sitting in a circle, glancing at the measures after each stitch. your body and it seemed to them that the wind had never blown so stubbornly, and that the Caribbean Sea had never been more agitated than on that night; and they had the feeling that it all had something to do with the dead. They thought that if this magnificent man lived in their village, the doors in his house would be the widest, the ceiling the highest, the floor the strongest, the bed frame would be made of large frames with iron bolts, and his wife would be the most happy. They thought: the power that he would possess would be so great that if he called any fish, it would immediately jump to him from the sea, and he would put so much effort into his work that springs would gush out of the waterless stones of the courtyards and he would be able to sow flowers on the steep cliffs of the coast. Secretly, women compared him with their husbands and thought that they could not do in a lifetime what he could do in one night, and ended up renouncing their husbands in their hearts as the most insignificant and miserable creatures in the world. So they wandered through the labyrinths of their fantasy, when the oldest of them, who, being the oldest, looked at the drowned man not so much with feeling as with sympathy, said with a sigh:
You can see from his face that his name is Esteban.
It was true. For most, it was enough to look at him again to understand that he could not have another name. The most stubborn of the women, who were also the youngest, imagined that if they dressed the dead man in patent leather shoes and placed him among flowers, he would look as if his name was Lautaro. But that was just their imagination. There was not enough linen, poorly cut and even worse sewn trousers turned out to be narrow for him, and from the shirt, obeying the mysterious force emanating from his chest, buttons flew off again and again. After midnight, the howling of the wind became thinner, and the sea fell into the sleepy stupor of Wednesday afternoon. Silence has ended last doubt: Undoubtedly, he is Esteban. The women who dressed him, combed his hair, shaved him and cut his nails, could not suppress their feelings of pity, as soon as they were convinced that he would have to lie on the floor. It was then that they realized what a misfortune it must be when your body is so large that it hinders you even after death. They imagined how, during his lifetime, he was doomed to enter the door sideways, painfully bang his head on the lintel, stand at a party, not knowing what to do with his tender and pink hands, like the flippers of a sea cow, while the hostess of the house was looking for the strongest chair and, dead with fear, sit down here, Esteban, be so kind, and he, leaning against the wall, smiling, don’t worry, señora, it’s comfortable for me, and it’s like they’ve flayed the skin from my heels, and there’s a heat on my back from endless repetitions of each since he is visiting, do not worry, señora, it is convenient for me, if only to avoid shame when a chair breaks under you; so I never, perhaps, never found out that those who said don’t go, Esteban, wait at least for coffee, then whispered, finally left, stupid tall, how good, finally left, beautiful fool. Here's what the women thought when they looked at dead body shortly before dawn. Later, when they covered his face with a handkerchief so that the light would not disturb him, they saw him so dead forever, so defenseless, so like their husbands, that their hearts opened and gave way to tears. One of the youngest sobbed first. The rest, as if infecting each other, also went from sighing to crying, and the more they sobbed, the more they wanted to cry, because more and more clearly the drowned man became Esteban for them; and at last, by the abundance of their tears, he became the most helpless man in the world, the meekest and most obliging, poor Esteban. And therefore, when the men returned and brought the news that the drowned man was not known in the neighboring villages, the women felt joy glimpsed in their tears.
Thanks be to the Lord, they sighed with relief, he is ours!
The men decided that all these tears and sighs were just female breaking. Tired of the night's torturous clarifications, they wanted only one thing: before they were stopped by the fierce sun of this windless, withered day, once and for all to get rid of the unwanted guest. From the wreckage of mizzen and foremasts, having fastened them together to support the weight of the body while it was being carried to the cliff, with ezelgofts, they built a stretcher. So that bad currents would not carry him back to the shore, as had happened more than once with other bodies, they decided to tie the anchor of a merchant ship to his ankles - then the drowned man would easily sink into the very depths of the sea, where the fish are blind, and the divers die of loneliness . But the more the men hurried, the more reasons women found to drag out the time. They ran like frightened chickens, snatched sea amulets from chests, and some wanted to put on the drowned man the amulets of a fair wind and interfered here, while others put a bracelet of the right course on his hand and interfered here, and in the end already: get out of here, woman, don’t interfere , don't you see - because of you I almost fell on the dead man, suspicions stirred in the soul of the men, and they began to grumble, what is it for, so many trinkets from a large altar for some stranger, because no matter how many gilded ones are on it and other trinkets, the sharks will still chew it, but the women still continued to rummage through their cheap relics, brought them and carried them away, ran into each other; meanwhile, from their sighs, something became clear that their tears did not directly explain, and finally the patience of the men burst, why should there be so much fuss because of a dead man thrown out by the sea, an unknown drowned man, a pile of cold meat. One of the women, stung by such indifference, removed the handkerchief from the face of the drowned man, and then the breath caught in the men too.
Yes, it was Esteban, of course. You didn't have to repeat it again for everyone to understand. If they had Sir Walter Raleigh in front of them, they might have been impressed by his gringo accent, the guacamayo on his shoulder, the arquebus to kill cannibals, but there will never be another like Esteban in the world. maybe, and here he is lying in front of them, stretched out like a sabalo fish, barefoot, in the pants of a premature baby and with nails hard as stone, which can only be cut with a knife. It was enough to remove the handkerchief from his face to see: he is ashamed, it is not his fault that he is so big, it is not his fault that he is so heavy and handsome, and, if he knew that everything would happen like this, he would have found another, more decent place, where to drown, seriously, I myself would tie the anchor of the galleon to my neck and step off the cliff, like a man who didn’t like it here, and wouldn’t bother you now with this, as you call it, the dead man of Wednesday afternoon, wouldn’t annoy anyone with this vile a pile of cold meat that has nothing to do with me. There was so much truth in what he was that even the most suspicious of men, those who were sick of the difficult nights of the sea, for they were terrified at the thought that their wives would get tired of dreaming about them and begin to dream of drowned men, even these and others, more solid, trembled from the sincerity of Esteban.
And so it happened that he was given the most magnificent funeral imaginable for a homeless drowned man. Several women, having gone to the neighboring villages for flowers, returned from there with women who did not believe what they were told, and these, when they saw the dead man with their own eyes, went to bring more flowers and, returning, brought new women with them, and finally , flowers and people accumulated so much that it became almost impossible to pass. IN last hour their hearts ached because they were returning him to the sea as an orphan, and from the best people the villages chose a father and mother for him, and others became his brothers, uncles, cousins, and it ended with the fact that thanks to him all the inhabitants of the village intermarried. Some sailors, having heard their cry from afar, doubted whether they were sailing on the right course, and it is known that one of them, remembering ancient tales about sirens, ordered to be tied to the main match. Arguing among themselves about the honor of carrying him on their shoulders to the cliff, the inhabitants of the village realized for the first time how bleak their streets are, how waterless the stones of their courtyards are, how narrow their dreams are next to the splendor and beauty of the drowned man. They threw him off the cliff, without tying the anchor, so that he could return whenever he wanted, and held their breath for that moment torn from the centuries that preceded the fall of the body into the abyss. They didn't even need to look at each other now to understand that they weren't all there and never would be. But they also knew that from now on everything would be different: the doors of their houses would be wider, the ceilings higher, the floors stronger, so that the memory of Esteban could go everywhere without hitting his head on the lintel, and in the future no one would dare to whisper, stupid tall he died, what a pity, the beautiful fool died, because, in order to perpetuate the memory of Esteban, they would paint the facades of their houses in cheerful colors and lie down with bones, and they would make springs gush out of waterless stones, and sow flowers on the steep slopes of the coastal cliffs, and at the dawn of future years, the passengers of huge ships will wake up, choking on the aroma of gardens on the high seas, and the captain will come down from the quarter quarters in his dress uniform with military medals on his chest, with his astrolabe and his Polar Star, and pointing to the cape, which has risen a mountain of roses on the horizon caribbean, will say in fourteen languages, look, over there, where the wind is now so gentle that it is laid to sleep under the beds, where the sun shines so brightly that the sunflowers do not know which way to turn, there, yes, there is the village of Esteban.
The time has come for us to try to uncover one of the most mysterious riddles- the secret of the Stranger from the Seine.
Stranger from the Seine. Even if you haven't heard of it, you've probably seen it. The white marble face of a girl with eyes closed with a barely perceptible smile on his lips.
This amazingly mysterious and beautiful image excites people for more than a century. Who is the author of this masterpiece? There is no author - this is a plaster cast made according to the death mask of a real girl.
And this is where the mystery begins. The image and story of The Stranger from the Seine roams from edition to edition, from blog to blog. According to many, her riddle is one of those mysteries that will never be solved, but we, my reader, armed with logic and common sense Let's try to find the key to this riddle. More precisely, I will tell you how I searched for answers myself, and you will go through all the stages of the search with me and agree or disagree with my conclusions.
In the meantime, consider the initial data for our investigation. At one time, many years ago, I came across glossy magazine with an article on the Stranger from the Seine with beautiful illustrations. Here is an exemplary text of that article.
“The Stranger from the Seine is the unidentified corpse of a 16-year-old girl found in the Seine River (in Paris), from whose face a plaster cast was made. The cast became famous as an example of female mystery and beauty.
The body of a young girl was found in the Seine at the end of 1900. No signs of violence were found on the body. Suicide was suggested as the most likely cause of death. The pathologist was so fascinated by the girl's appearance that he made a plaster cast. The girl was never identified by anyone.
Over the course of several years, copies of the print circulated in Paris and became a fashionable attribute in bohemian society. This image has become a cult in Germany. Writers, poets and artists drew inspiration from the image of the girl and dedicated their works to her. Albert Camus compares her smile to that of the Mona Lisa, poet and cultural critic Al Alvarez writes in his book that an entire generation of German fashionistas compared their appearance to her as an ideal. Vladimir Nabokov dedicated the poem L'Inconnue de la Seine (1934) to an unknown drowned woman, which says, in part:
In endlessly fading strings
I hear the voice of your beauty.
In the pale crowds of young drowned women
All paler and more captivating you.
You humble with me at least in sounds,
Your lot was fortunately stingy,
So answer with a deathly grin
Enchanted plaster lips.
With slight variations, this text and its fragments can be found anywhere, with the names "one of the most mysterious mysteries of the twentieth century", " mystical secrets no answers", "ten mysterious deaths" etc.
So, what is the mystery of our stranger?
Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people saw her image already in the first years after the publication of photographs in newspapers and magazines of that time, plaster casts were sold in many fashion stores. It would seem that with such fame, she should have been identified rather quickly. However, this did not happen. No, of course, it seems like stories of suicides (murders) of young girls in Paris or its environs surfaced one after another. However, journalists exposed them every time. No, the stories themselves were quite real, only the dead girls had nothing to do with the Stranger from the Seine.
At the same time, a version quickly appeared that the mask was not posthumous, but removed from a living model. Names were called, in particular the name of one owner of a workshop in Germany, producing sculptural images of this mask.
But to be honest, this version did not seem convincing then and now for the reason that in this case the girl would have been identified even faster and more likely than if she were a real drowned woman. Yes, and to imagine a father selling the image of his daughter in the form of a death mask of a French suicide girl is somehow too much for Germany of those years.
The option was also popular that it was actually a fake, the work of an obscure talented sculptor who decided to glorify his creation in such an extravagant way. Perhaps this is a very convincing version. This half-smile, charm and beauty of the face of a young girl really looks like the work of a real master. And we will definitely return to this version.
In the meantime, it's time for us to get to work and try to analyze such a meager data.
Could it be that the suicidal girl was not identified? After all, now and then in big cities corpses are found that remain unidentified. This could well have been if not for her replicated image. She simply had to be identified! Someone will say that her relatives could well have recognized her, but they did not officially recognize her because of the poverty of the family (the funeral is still a considerable expense) or they simply wanted to hide the shame of the family (suicide is a grave sin).
Well, that makes sense, but such an explanation may explain the silence of the relatives, but it does not explain in any way that no one ELSE recognized her.
For me, there are two quite reasonable explanations, the first, the mask is actually a fake and such a girl never existed, and, second, the mask is real, but ...
Think for yourself, why the girl's face could not be identified if the death mask was absolutely real? Only in one case - the mask was removed long before 1900, at least two or three decades. Then it is quite possible that after so many years no one recognized her, and even if he did, then when he heard the story of the Stranger from the Seine, he only shrugged his shoulders and marveled at the striking resemblance.
Now is the time to turn to the experts. Who can be an expert in this field? Of course, a pathologist with extensive experience. At one time, I turned with a question to a good friend of my father, a pathologist with 20 years of experience: can the girl depicted in the photo be a drowned woman?
And got the answer - very unlikely. I will not give a list of not too pleasant details with which he argued his answer, but he was just that. My second question immediately followed, is it possible to determine whether a cast was taken from a living girl or from a dead one?
The answer puzzled me. The pathologist confidently pointed out to me that the cast (if it is real) was finalized in the workshop for greater artistry, real casts save a bunch small parts, but they are not here. In other words, the image is as if processed by a computer, like the faces of models in glossy magazines. After such a “processing”, it is impossible to say for sure whether the mask is a cast from the face of a living girl or a dead one.
However, he still added a couple of details that will be significant enough in our investigation with you. With a high probability, this is a mask, and not just a sculptural image, or, alternatively, it was made by a master who knows well what a death mask should look like. The muscles of the face are relaxed and the girl's head, when removing the mask, was in a horizontal position, face up. If the mask is removed from the face of the deceased, then this happened shortly after her death (most likely no more than a day).
It turns out, despite the romanticism of the name, our Stranger from the Seine is most likely not a drowned woman, and therefore the story of her being in the river is nothing more than a legend. However, it does not get easier for me, because at the moment we have two versions, or rather even three versions.
The first is a mask, a skillful forgery of the sculptor, stylized as a death mask. The second is that the mask was actually removed much earlier than 1900. But most importantly, it is still unclear to us whether it was taken from a living girl or from a dead one.
At that time, I had no other information. However time is running, and when at the beginning of the 2000s I came across another publication about the Stranger from the Seine on the net, I decided to look for information outside the Russian-speaking (then very meager) sector of the Internet. This time the catch was much more interesting!
The first thing I found were previously unfamiliar photos of the mask. You say so what? The fact is that I found a photo of a mask from the early 1900s and it was a photo of a REAL mask (or one of its first copies) without the very “artistic” processing!
And here it immediately became clear - this is a mask with many small unnecessary details, and not a sculptural image.
Here the image is not so beautiful, the face seems quite ordinary, although not without attractiveness. So now you can more the probability of discarding the fake version of the mask. However, it is still impossible to unequivocally state that the mask is posthumous even from these photographs.
The second discovery was that the date indicated in the magazine article (autumn 1900) is the most common, but other dates for finding the Stranger from the Seine slipped - 1880, 1875, and even 1870.
Such serious discrepancies in dates once again confirmed me in the belief that the story of finding the Stranger from the Seine is nothing more than a legend. Most likely the mask is indeed removed from dead girl long before 1900.
Why with the deceased, you ask? Why take the mask off a live model? As you can see, the girl did not shine with any special beauty. At that time, photography was already known, in Paris there were many artists who could paint a portrait for a very reasonable price. In addition, removing the mask from the deceased was a tradition of that time. The only thing you could be sure of was that the girl did not belong to high society Paris. Otherwise, she would have been identified fairly quickly, even though the mask had been removed a long time ago.
This concludes the first part of the investigation.
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To be continued...
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© LysyKamrad
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What will happen in the next parts?
I promise you and I will be able to look into the eyes of the Stranger from the Seine. We will see her in all the splendor of her youthful beauty. And yes, you may not agree with the conclusions of my investigation, I do not pretend to be completely reliable, but, you must admit, the very POSSIBILITY to look behind the scenes of a mystery more than a century old is worth a lot.
Amazing story the most famous drowned woman in the world as presented by was.media.
In the 1880s, the Parisian morgue on the Île de la Cité was a tourist attraction, displaying unidentified corpses in display cases on black marble tables. People came to look at them in search of missing relatives and ordinary onlookers. Once on such a table was the body of a 16-year-old drowned woman. The girl was fished out of the Seine River near the Louvre. Nobody recognized her.
"The Stranger from the Seine". Source: Wikipedia
Muse of modernists
No signs of violence were found on the body. Perhaps the girl committed suicide. The pathologist, impressed by her peaceful expression, decided to remove her death mask. It was common practice back then. The cast recorded soft features and a slight smile.
The cast was displayed in a mortuary window, and suddenly it became very fashionable. They began to make copies of the mask for sale. The face of the "Stranger" was now considered the standard of beauty. Parisian bohemia recognized it as a work of art, they decorated the walls of houses and shop windows. Philosophers have speculated that the expression on a girl's face can tell about life and death. The artists painted portraits. In the USA they even staged a ballet. Albert Camus saw the mysteriousness of Mona Lisa in the face, and Vladimir Nabokov dedicated a poem to him:
Hurrying the denouement of this life,
not loving anything on earth,
I keep looking at the white mask
your lifeless face.In endlessly fading strings
I hear the voice of your beauty.
In the pale crowds of young drowned women
all paler and more captivating you.
The poem was written in 1934. That is, half a century after the death of the "Stranger from the Seine" continued to excite the minds. But her the main role was still ahead.
mouth to mouth
1958 Norwegian puppeteer Asmud Laerdal is expanding his business into the medical field, producing rubber wound imitations and first aid supplies. He receives an order to develop a mannequin, on which future doctors could practice resuscitation.
The customer is the Austrian doctor Peter Safar, author of courses on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Laerdal approaches the assignment with all seriousness. A few years earlier, he managed to perform artificial respiration on a two-year-old son who choked while swimming.
Assuming that medical students would refuse to perform mouth-to-mouth breathing on male mannequins, Laerdal decided to make the simulator "female". He copied the face from the mask of the Stranger from the Seine.
The mannequin was named Resusci Anne ("Animated Anna"). So the unknown Parisian found a name.
The instructor demonstrates the technique of cardiopulmonary resuscitation on a mannequin. Photo: Depositphotos
Mannequin for practicing cardiopulmonary resuscitation skills. Photo: ~aorta~ / Flickr
Since then, Resusci Anne has become a model for all such dummies, and every first aid student kisses a drowned woman from the Seine. There are millions of them, so "The Stranger" is called the most kissable girl in the world.
Later, other mannequins appeared. For example, the removal of foreign objects from the respiratory tract is practiced on Choking Charlie, and the Ukrainian mannequin for practicing first aid was called Taras.
Mystery not yet revealed
Posthumous fame haunts researchers of the personality of a stranger. Modern pathologists claim that the mask was removed from a living girl. Criminologists prove that the faces of drowned people are not so calm.
Mask "Strangers from the Seine" at the exhibition "History of Resuscitation". Photo: USC Norris Medical Library / Megan Rosenbloom / Flickr
According to one version, the mask is removed from the face of the model French painter Jules Lefebvre, who died of tuberculosis in 1875.
The second says that "The Stranger" is a young German woman who gave birth to a child from the cast maker.
The third calls her the Hungarian actress Eva Lazlo, who fled to Paris from a blackmailer who caught her in touch with a rich man. married man. (This version has been debunked, the photo of the actress is a photomontage using the same death mask - approx. "Favorites")
Actress Eva Lazlo.
