The body of the unknown young woman was pulled out of the River Seine at the Quai du Louvre in Paris around the late 1880s. Some specialists have estimated the girl’s age to be no greater than 16 years, according to her firmness of the skin and features.
Since the body showed no signs of violence, suicide was suspected. A pathologist at the Paris Morgue was so smitten with the unknown woman's face that he made a plaster cast of it. That became a death mask that was sold all over the country. The copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society.
Albert Camus compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa. Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal, the creators of the first aid mannequin Resusci Anne, chose the Seine woman’s death mask as the face of the CPR doll in 1958 and was used starting in 1960 in numerous CPR courses. The face has been called "the most kissed face" of all time.
