The Happy Suicide

 

From the Seine's choppy waters one night in the late 1880's emerged a pale oval, bobbing and gleaming in the moonlight. It was a sixteen-year-old girl's face, dead but smiling serenely. She was dressed in all black, so in the inky water her fair face seemed disembodied, like the eerily grinning flowers in a Redon lithograph.

She was a suicide victim, and at that moment the epitome of loneliness. But this was fin-de-siècle Paris, a megalopolis bewitched by a morbid-chic pop culture thanks to poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and necrophilia was in full bloom along with the Fleurs de Mal. Municipal morgues were open to the public, originally for the practical reason that the public might help with identifying the anonymously departed. Romantic types could spend a lazy Sunday strolling through the rows of cadavers, maybe to feel alive, maybe to commune with ghosts, or perhaps to visit the lost stories of other people's lives. This girl, so sorry to live that she threw herself into the Seine and so happy to die that her corpse was was found with a smile, quickly became a star.

By legend, a morgue worker was so taken with the suicide victim’s beauty that he cast her face in plaster for private admiration. Death masks were nothing new, and had shared their utilitarian function of pre-photography documentation with a spiritual dimension of soul-capturing for thousands of years. There had been death masks cast in wax or plaster in almost every culture since the Middle Ages, and before that, they were sculpted in mud or clay. Just a few years before the Parisienne's suicide, archaeologists had discovered the bodies of six Mycenaean men in Peloponnese, Greece, their ancient skulls adorned by golden masks extravagant enough to inspire speculation amongst historians that they had unearthed the heroes of Homer's epics. But the fanciful spirit of her time and the power of reproduction combined to give the suicide victim a popular resonance, and her death mask was the first to become an urban meme. She became know as L'Inconnue de la Seine.