Wikipedia entry for L’Inconnue de la Seine
L’INCONNUE DE LA SEINE.–The history of this lovely but clearly unhappy young woman appears to be veiled in mysterious but compassionate obscurity. In the eyes of the world and according to the justice which she meted out to herself she was guilty of suicide, choosing death in the waters of the Seine, since the burden laid upon her feeble shoulders seemed too heavy to bear. For us she is a dainty butterfly fluttering without a care around the flame of life and so destroying and burning her wings before her time.
The death mask was taken in the Paris morgue. The whereabouts of the original is unknown to me.Black & White Photos and quotations from: Benkard, Ernst, & Green, Margaret (1927). Undying Faces, A Collection of Death Masks. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.An excellent blog post about the history of this mask: http://victimshere.blogspot.com/2009/04/linconnue-de-la-seine.html