She finally sold the mask and mould to a model shop not far from Madame Debord’s flat, the owner in agreement that indeed, there was something intriguing about the unknown woman. The girl who swept was paid an amount that was equal to what she earned over several weeks of sweeping floors and scraping dried plaster off wooden spatulas and bowls. She walked out of the shop clapping dust off her hands and feeling wholly satisfied. She would hand the money over to her mother, minus the amount needed to buy herself her first-ever, grown-up hat.

The mask was hung in the centre of the model-shop window by a delicate piece of twine, and labelled with the placard L’Inconnue de la Seine, The Unknown Woman of the Seine, and was ignored for several weeks. The proprietor was about to move it to the back of his shop when along came a moderately successful Romanian artist, who had been living and painting street scenes in the Latin Quarter for several years. He purchased the mask and hung it on the wall of his studio, and, from that point on, every street scene he painted included a woman with my face – so small it was undetectable to anyone but him, yet still. The model-shop proprietor cast another mask and sold it within a week to the manager of the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques, who hung it in one of his dressing rooms. The next to purchase the mask was a poet, a woman, and after that, another painter. It followed that the mask became very fashionable for artists and intellectuals in Paris, which led, as these things always did, to it gaining the attention of the bourgeoisie. Twenty years after my death, the mask, reproduced en masse, hung over the stone mantelpieces of textile manufacturers and factory owners, alcohol agents and landlords, and then regular, working-class people too, not just in France but also Germany, Italy, England, Norway. The story, by then as generic as the lower-quality plaster used to spin out the hundreds of reproductions, had been boiled down to the obvious main points: peasant woman impregnated by a man who outclassed her. River. Identity unknown. Somewhere along the line, interestingly, a new element had been added. Apparently, some said, the mask had originally been commissioned by a lonely pathologist working in the city morgue who empathized with the innocence and beauty of the drowned woman and fell instantly in love. Close to the truth, yet still, not the truth. The girl who swept (who, by the time she died in 1965, was running her own, very successful theatre company in New York City, and who still kept her first-ever, grown-up hat in a box in a closet in a ground-floor apartment on Bleecker Street) would have appreciated that embellishment, and been vexed that she hadn’t thought of it herself.

And neither she, nor I, nor Laurent Tardieu, nor the young mouleur would ever have expected that the mask would become muse to so many. And the words that were used to describe this inconnue de la Seine? Well. She was often portrayed as pure and innocent (no). Jilted (perhaps). Seductress (if only). She was compared to the river-borne Ophelia and moved the pens of Anaïs Nin and Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov, like the rest of them, assumed I had been seduced and let down by a man. Suggested that maybe this man was a womanizer, or some kind of drunken artiste. He called L’Inconnue the palest and sweetest of all. He accused her of having frail shoulders. An English novelist wrote a bit of schmaltz about a poet locking himself away with the mask and losing everything because of his devotion to it. The melancholic poet referred to the mask as le Silencieux.