[4] A pathologist at the Paris Morgue was, according to the story, so taken by her beauty that he felt compelled to make a wax plaster cast death mask of her face.

[5] According to the draughtsman Georges Villa, who received this information from his master, the painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre, the impression was taken from the face of a young model who died of tuberculosis around 1875, but no trace of the original cast remained.

compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa, evoking much speculation as to what clues the seemingly happy expression, perceived as eerily serene, on her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.

"[8] As of 2017 a workshop called L'Atelier Lorenzi in Arcueil made plaster death masks from a 19th-century mold, which is said to be that of L'Inconnue de la Seine.

[9] The earliest mention can be found in Richard Le Gallienne's 1900 novella The Worshipper of the Image, in which an English poet falls in love with the mask, eventually leading to the death of his daughter and the suicide of his wife.

Kathy Reichs' forensic anthropologist character, Temperance Brennan, discusses the L'Inconnue de la Seine case with a colleague in the 2021 crime novel The Bone Code.

Maurice Blanchot, who owned one of the masks, described her as "a young girl with closed eyes, enlivened by a smile so relaxed and at ease ... that one could have believed that she drowned in an instant of extreme happiness".

In 2012, Didier Blonde wrote a novel called L'Inconnue de la Seine, about a man in Paris who stumbles upon a copy of the mask in an antiques store, and who tries to find out more about the girl it was modelled after.

[16] The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), reflects: The caster I visit every day has two masks hanging next to his door.

[17]In 1926 Ernst Benkard published Das ewige Antlitz, a book about 126 death masks, writing about our subject that she is "like a delicate butterfly to us, who, carefree and exhilarated, fluttered right into the lamp of life, scorching her fine wings.

A male pathologist was said to have recorded the face of an unidentified young woman who, around the age of sixteen, according to his story, had been found drowned in the River Seine at Paris, around the late 1880s.

The cast was also compared to the Mona Lisa, and other famous paintings and sculptures, so much so that, in the following years, copies of the mask became fashionable figures in Parisian Bohemian society.

German bitpop group Welle:Erdball included the track "L'Inconnue de la Seine" on their 2017 album Gaudeamus Igitur.

[26] Man Ray in 1966 made a series of surrealist mises-en-scène pictures of a cast, in one case placing it on a pillow in bed, and these are held in the collection of the Centre Pompidou.