It is one of Paris’s most haunting legends. Sometime in the late 19th century, so the story goes, the body of a young woman was pulled from the Seine.  She bore no obvious signs of violence and wore an unusually peaceful expression, leading some to believe she had taken her own life. Attempts to identify her proved fruitless, and so she became known simply as L’Inconnue de la Seine – the Unknown Woman of the Seine.  According to the legend, her body was taken to the Paris Morgue. Commissioned by Baron Haussmann and opened in 1868 on the Quai de l’Archevêché, behind Notre-Dame, the building resembled a small Greek temple, and unidentified bodies were laid out inside on marble slabs behind a plate-glass window.  The Morgue, Paris; by Nôtre Dame. Etching, 1829. Image: Wikimedia Commons Many visitors came not to identify anyone but to look. The morgue became one of the most popular attractions in the city, until Prefect Louis Lépine closed it to the public in 1907 on grounds of moral hygiene. It was demolished in the early 1920s, and the site at the eastern tip of the Île de la Cité is now the Square de l’Île-de-France and the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation.   No one came forward to identify the mysterious young woman. A plaster cast was made of her face, supposedly by a pathologist struck by her serene expression. With her faint smile and delicate features, the mask seemed strangely lifelike, and copies soon began appearing in artists’ studios, fashionable homes and shop windows across Europe. Among the Parisian workshops turning them out was L’Atelier Lorenzi, founded in 1871 by an Italian moulder who had come to the city from Tuscany.  L’inconnue de la Seine, mortuary mask. Wikimedia commons By the early 20th century, L’Inconnue had become an unlikely cultural icon. Albert Camus is said to have called her the drowned Mona Lisa.  Rainer Maria Rilke carried a copy back to Berlin from Paris in 1905, probably bought from Lorenzi, and the mask surfaces in his 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, in a passage describing two plaster faces hanging outside a moulder’s shop the narrator passes each day. Louis Aragon and Jules Supervielle later returned to her enigmatic image, and in 1966 the Surrealist photographer Man Ray photographed the mask for an edition of Aragon’s novel Aurélien – proof that L’Inconnue’s hold over the artistic imagination had lasted for decades. Two examples of 20th-century cast. Photo: Fluffigkatt/ Wikimedia commons