For fifty years this was the most looked at face in Europe. The casts hung in studios and student rooms from Paris to Berlin and everyone who owned one wrote her a life. Richard Le Gallienne got there first in 1900, with a poet who falls in love with a dead woman's face. Rilke put the masks by the moulder's door in 1910. Nabokov gave her a poem in 1934. Aragon built a novel around a man who loves a living woman for looking like her. Camus called the smile a drowned Mona Lisa.

Who she was has never been settled. The account everybody repeats is that a young woman was taken from the river at the Quai du Louvre in the late 1880s and never identified, and that someone at the morgue cast her face. A draughtsman said instead that it came from a model who died of tuberculosis around 1875. Another account makes her a German mask maker's daughter.

Then in 1958 a doctor and a Norwegian toymaker needed a face for the first resuscitation mannequin and used this one. From 1960 it was the face every first aid class in the world practised on.

This is an early cast in the French manner, early 1900s. Two iron wires are bedded into the plaster of the back, pressed in while it was still wet and rusting outward into it ever since, and the surface has gone the uneven ivory that only time gives.