Silencieux is the mute heroine of The Worshipper of the Image, Richard La Galliene’s little known fairy-tale from 1900. She has no body, only a serene face, and as the narrator begins to tell his wife about this extraordinary beauty, any well-schooled early twentieth century intellectual would know exactly which face he meant.
Silencieux was the L’Inconnue de la Seine: a body dredged from that river in the late 1880s and dropped off at the morgue before burial. A pathologist at the morgue was so impressed by her preserved beauty that he took a death mask of her features. The mask is soon copied and hung in parlors all over Paris. In the novel, La Gallienne has the pathologist kill himself over her beauty as an added effect.
The Paris morgue was located just off of the Seine on the Ile de la Cite. It was a cavernous room with a wall of glass and a curtain to reveal the day’s bodies with a little flourish. The purpose of the public morgue was to promote identification, but the effect was a sideshow, an urban romance of suicide and unwanted pregnancy. The most beautiful women and children, the most lifelike and sleeping, were written up in the newspaper and crowds would line up outside the morgue to see the bodies before they started to spoil.
No one could identify the Inconnue so she was wrapped up and shoveled into a common grave. This was the end of her body, but her face was resurrected again and again for a small fee. Those who didn’t own it had at the very least seen it, and apocrypha ran amok. Nabokov wrote a poem about her mysterious lover, and Rilke about her suicide. La Gallienne fell down the rabbit hole for her entirely—his book is dedicated to the fictional Silencieux:
“The manner in which Antony had found and come to love Silencieux was a strange illustration of that law by which one love grows out of another—that lay by which men love living women because of the dead, and dead women because of the living.”
Death masks usually stink a little of death: the flesh gone from the face, the features limp, the beard grown in a little, the mouth open. What is this face that inspired a generation of artists? It is round, full cheeked, with small eyes, all parts in perfect symmetry. She’s an empirical beauty, like a little Pythagorean woman. And of course, she has the Mona Lisa smile. In the hundred years since her death, there’s been a push to identify or discredit her. Perhaps the mask is simply an artist’s model or the daughter of a sculptor? This one’s got to have touched death to make it matter.
The mask of the Inconnue de la Seine is still available from Lorenzi in Paris, a model maker that has distributed the death masks of Napoleon and Robspierre since 1871. She is also the face of one of the world’s first CPR mannequins, Rescue Anne, introduced in 1960 to a public who had for the most part forgotten the face of the world most famous unknown.
