drowned woman
Anya was the only and late child in the family, and this left its mark on her. Self-willed and capricious, she knew no refusal in anything. Kindergarten she did not attend - her mother diligently nurtured the girl and thought with horror about the day when she would have to be sent to school. However, my mother was afraid in vain - Anechka quickly found friends to match herself and by the fourth grade she skillfully mocked less successful schoolchildren.
The only place where the girl was not spoiled was the yard of her grandmother's house. The local children sparkled all summer with torn elbows and knees, wore shorts and T-shirts that had faded in the sun, mastered the nearby woods and did not put Anechka's idols in anything. However, she was not particularly bullied there - just for the sake of appearances. Sometimes Anechka's overweight grandmother floated heavily out of the house, sat down on a stool knocked together for her and asked for nettles. With nettles, she lashed her sore legs for a long time and with pleasure and groaned when the blow turned out to be too stinging. The children, fascinated, gathered around and looked at her legs - swollen, bluish in color, and then in the evenings they came up with horror stories about the living dead. Such is the muse of children.
Anechka usually listened silently scary tales, from time to time screaming in fright and then demanding to take her to the apartment. However, this did not save her - while the gentleman saw off the coward, he friends - comrades, taking advantage of the darkness, hid in the bushes near the entrance, and then suddenly jumped out at the approaching couple, not forgetting to roll their eyes, howl and try to hook the girl with their twisted fingers. Anya squealed predictably - at first frightened, and then indignantly, she ran home, slamming the door and showing her tongue on the threshold, and the boys laughed and walked back to the other children, making faces along the way and mimicking the victim.
All summer the guys played in the yard, walked in the forest and ran to the river to sunbathe and swim. One day the children saw a drowned man being pulled out of the river. Some guy, relaxing on the shore with friends, decided to show his prowess and jump from the railway bridge into the water. He dived to dive, but rescuers were already getting him from the bottom. He ran his hip against the old fittings and was never able to swim out on his own.
Two days later, the guys were swimming in the river as if nothing had happened.
And a couple of days later, Lesha was the first to voice new plot horror stories:
“Fifteen years ago, seven people drowned in our river in one summer. They were hardly found in thickets of tenacious algae, which covered the entire bottom of the river. When people bathed, they felt riverweed scratching their bare stomachs, trying to wrap themselves around thin legs and hands. But, nevertheless, none of the swimmers drowned during the day. The river received all the dead at night, when foolish people dared to enter the water under the light of the moon. Who knows how they felt dark water? To stop the series of deaths, the men decided to call divers and they mowed the underwater fields, cleaned the river bottom and took away the algae. Since then, the river has become shallow. Do you think that guy died by accident? No, it is the predatory algae that have grown again, it is the river itself that is forced to take human lives in order to become full-flowing again.
This story made a depressing impression on Anya - she remembered her grandmother's swollen blue legs and how the old woman complained to her neighbor:
“For fifteen years this disease has been tormenting me!”
She saw the drowned guy only from afar, but still noticed the heaviness of his figure and the color of his skin. And now the girl was tormented by suspicions - what if her grandmother also drowned fifteen years ago, but found a way to return home? There is no need to be seven spans in the forehead to guess everything. She became scared and uncomfortable. And where should she go now? Home, to a terrible grandmother?
Anya thought about this for a long time and decided to get to her room until it was completely dark. And there it will close and wait until the morning. And in the morning she will ask her mother to take her back home. Yes, she will do that.
They saw off Anechka in the old fashioned way, but the usual prank angered her in earnest. And anger, combined with fear, deprived her of feelings. The children were frightened and brought her home to their grandmother. The next morning she woke up already in bed and her grandmother was lying next to her. she died, she had a heart attack.
Anya got scared and ran NOW she didn't know what to do. suddenly grandma will come back.
She lived in Paris, after her death she became a legend, after 60 years she was resurrected in Norway, she still saves human lives. Her name is unknown.
In the 1880s, the Parisian morgue on the Ile 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 the 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.
"Unknown Mother of God from the Urk Canal", 1927. Photo: Albert Rudomin / Galerie Michelle Chomette, Paris / Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographi e
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, the 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.)
Actress Eva Lazlo.
The amazing story of the world's most famous drowned woman as presented by was.media.
In the 1880s, the Parisian mortuary on the Ile de la Cité was a tourist attraction - unidentified corpses were displayed 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 main role was yet to come.
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 was removed from the face of the model of the 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 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.
I already wrote one story. But it's not nearly as scary as this one. It really happened to me ... I'm still afraid to go into the sea ... Well, let's do it in order.
It was summer. 2010 Sakhalin Island (I live on it). With me, as always, my bosom girlfriends. Phoned in the morning, got together and went to the sea. I forgot to give the names of my girlfriends - Alena and Nastya. Let's go further. We arrived at the beach around 10 am. Without parents (do not think, they let us go alone). Despite the fact that it was only ten o'clock, people had already gathered on the beach. We undressed and went swimming.
A family sat next to us. An ordinary family, two children and father and mother. Only visitors. I have never seen them in the city. Well family and family. I didn't pay much attention to them. But in vain ... I forgot something else: during the winter, several boulders rolled into the sea in our sea. I myself don't know how. Just in the middle of the water rises a boulder, from a small child.
Further. We swim, rejoice, here I look: on this boulder sits that mother who was sitting next to us with her family. Sits like a mermaid. Well, I think: the person is resting. We sailed away and swim. Here we hear a cry: “Mom is gone!!!”. We look: there is no one on the boulder, and men are diving near it. We jumped out of the water like crazy. And they pull that mother out of the water ... We were in shock. They immediately packed up and headed home.
It's a pity ... Children left for one father. Then it rained for three days. They said that in this mother's bag they found suicide note. You see, I was getting ready. The woman's body was taken home. Several weeks have passed. This story began to be forgotten ... We again went to the sea with the whole company. On the beach, as then, there were a lot of people. But I still felt uneasy...
She spat on all fears, went for a swim. The water was like fresh milk. My friends and I are having fun, I myself did not notice how I swam up to that boulder. Got to the bottom. Everything is as usual. I think: what to be afraid of? Then someone grabbed my leg. I'll get out of the water. Well, I think: what kind of ghosts can there be? And why should they take me? Then, I look: in that place someone is blowing bubbles. So, I think, or drown and just someone pinned. What to do? If you call for help, they will pull you out, but if they are kidding you? Was it in vain to call for help? What if they really drown? It turns out, let the man drown? Decided to check it out first. She quickly called her friends, climbed. We dived. The water is so clear. She opened her eyes and it seemed to me cold water doused ... There was THE SAME WOMAN THAT DROWNED A FEW WEEKS AGO!!! We almost pere****is!!! They just flew out of the water. Things were thrown into a bag in a lump and instantly home. Just like that in bathing suits and barefoot. Okay, they ran along the beach ... And in the city! Barefoot, wet, frightened ... Then whole month all the boys who saw us laughed at us ... I told this adventure to my mother. She didn't believe me, of course. But then I had this dream so many times ... I screamed in a dream ... My mother took me to a psychologist. But now I seem to be okay with it. Sometimes I think maybe it was a glitch?
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 we have this moment 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.
