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It was in the 1880s, or so the legend goes, that the body of a young woman was pulled from the river Sen in Paris. Her

corpse was taken to what had by then become a strange and morbid tourist attraction the Paris morgue.

A place where gawkers and amateur sloths spent hours staring at unidentified lifeless bodies as if they're witnessing some grand display of macabre performance art.

It was there that the unknown girl's pretty face and compelling smile supposedly caught

the eye of a pathologist at the morgue, and he immortalized her transcendent beauty in the form of a plaster

death mask.

It was believed that the nameless young woman committed suicide in the unforgiving waters of the

Sen. But her smile, a smile that was said to be that of a drowned Mona Lisa made her likeness irresistible.

The young woman who had come to be known as La Kanyu de la Sen, or in English, the unknown woman of the Sen, was fated to be the The dead young woman with the eerily peaceful countenance and a smile that seemed to coily

hold the secrets of the afterlife would end up having her death mask replicated widely and sold at a brisk rate in Paris.

Her face became a fixture on walls, bookcases, nooks and crannies, all over homes in Europe and beyond.

Lachanyu de la Sen had been raised from the dead, and she was a sensation.

It wasn't long before a bit of an obsession overtook many owners of her reproduced mask and this mystery of a

dead woman without a known name or story begged to be answered.

Quickly, myths of her story began to spring up.

The most popular one with many variations is that she followed a lover to Paris, where she was coldly rejected and being the supposedly

passionate person she was and overcome by depression she dramatically drowned herself in the

sen because of course the only reason a woman would kill herself is because of a man, right?

It has also been said that a generation of German young women romanticizing the beautiful

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