[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: And today on the podcast, something from our producer Sean Cole.

ROBERT: You've been out doing something.

SEAN COLE: [laughs] I've been doing many things.

ROBERT: Yes, but I mean, in particular with regard to this podcast. You have a story for us.

SEAN: I do.

ROBERT: Don't tell us about those other things.

JAD: Nope. What's the story?

SEAN: So this is a story about a woman.

ROBERT: Good.

SEAN: You've seen her face.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Comes from our producer Sean Cole.

SEAN: You may have even ...

JAD: Dated her?

SEAN: Well, put your mouth on her.

JAD: Explain.

SEAN: So you know when you gotta bring somebody back to life?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Go. one, two ...]

ROBERT: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... three, four, five ...]

SEAN: They make you take a class.

JAD: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... six, seven, eight ...]

SEAN: And they make you practice on this dummy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... nine, ten ...]

JAD: CPR, yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... eleven, twelve, thirteen ...]

SEAN: And the dummy has this face?

JAD: That you suck on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... fourteen, fifteen, sixteen ...]

SEAN: Well you don't suck on it, you blow into it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... seventeen, eighteen, nineteen ...]

JAD: That's what I meant.

SEAN: You don't know a lot about CPR.

JAD: Ah, right. Well, what's the story with the dummy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five ...]

SEAN: Well, so that lady ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty ...]

SEAN: ... before she was a dummy, that face belonged to an actual woman's face.

JAD: The CPR dummy's face is an actual lady?

SEAN: An actual lady that was transfixing and inspiring to millions of people, and used to basically hang out with Napoleon and Mozart.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Come on!

SEAN: True.

JEREMY GRANGE: Yes.

SEAN: I first heard this story from this guy Jeremy Grange.

JEREMY GRANGE: I'm a producer with BBC Radio in the UK.

SEAN: He made a documentary about all of this a while back. But basically ...

JEREMY GRANGE: We ...

SEAN: ... story starts, our story starts in Norway in the early 1950s. There was this toymaker named Asmund Laerdal.

JEREMY GRANGE: And Asmund Laerdal was making plastic toys, brightly colored toys.

SEAN: And this story also involves ...

JEREMY GRANGE: His two year old son, Tore.

TORE LAERDAL: I'm Tore Laerdal.

SEAN: He's all grown up now.

TORE LAERDAL: Well, obviously, I don't recall the details myself, but it's been told to me that ...

SEAN: One day, he and his father Asmund are at their summer home, which is on the ocean. And somehow, Tore toddles his way out of sight and the next thing anyone knows ...

TORE LAERDAL: I was found floating face down in the sea. And I was just kept floating by some air trapped in a raincoat.

JAD: He's on top of a raincoat on the water, or ...?

SEAN: I think the raincoat is on top of him, but basically it's keeping him aloft.

JAD: So there's a bubble of air underneath.

SEAN: Yeah. And then Asmund, his dad, sees him.

TORE LAERDAL: I don't know how long I have been in the water, but when I was pulled up by my father, I was lifeless.

SEAN: And not only does Asmund not know mouth-to-mouth resuscitation ...

TORE LAERDAL: This was in 1954.

SEAN: ... there is no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

ROBERT: You mean, people didn't know about it.

SEAN: It hadn't really been developed yet. And so his dad ...

TORE LAERDAL: He was shaking me.

SEAN: Doing whatever he could.

TORE LAERDAL: Gradually, I responded.

SEAN: And as fate would have it, not long after that, Asmund, having freshly saved his son from drowning, is contacted by the man who is developing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

JEREMY GRANGE: An Austrian doctor called Peter Safar.

SEAN: He had worked out all the basics of CPR with the mouth to mouth and the compressing the chest and everything like that. But ...

JEREMY GRANGE: He realized he needed a way for people to practice this. And ...

TORE LAERDAL: My father was asked whether he possibly could help making some kind of training device.

SEAN: And pretty quickly, Asmund thought, "Well, we need a dummy."

JEREMY GRANGE: And Asmund had to decide what the face of this dummy was gonna look like.

SEAN: Should it be a woman, should it be a man?

JEREMY GRANGE: I think he felt that people would be more intimidated or shyer if it was a man's face, so he decided to go with a woman's face.

SEAN: An attractive woman's face.

TORE LAERDAL: Because at that time you were asking laypeople to blow into a quote- unquote "dead person."

SEAN: You know, you don't want to blow into somebody who's gaping with a horror face.

JAD: [laughs]

SEAN: She should look comfortably dead.

TORE LAERDAL: And then he came across this girl in my grandparents' home.

SEAN: Asmund is there in the house and he looks up at the wall and sees this face of a woman. It's a mask.

TORE LAERDAL: And my father was taken back by the beauty of this face.

SEAN: And he says, "That's the face I'll use."

JAD: This is a mask? What kind of mask was this?

SEAN: It was a death mask.

JAD: What's a death mask?

SEAN: All right, I'm gonna get—I'm gonna go back even further here, so stay with me for a minute.

JAD: Okay.

SEAN: Back in the 19th century, commonly, people, after they were dead, they'd have masks made of their faces because you want to preserve their countenance. So right after the person dies, pretty much, you take a bunch of clay and you stick it on their face and you make a mold, fill the mold with plaster, and then you've got a plaster mask, and you can reproduce it, and reproduce it. It was especially common in Paris.

KRISTEN CLARK: Hey, Radiolab! It is a sunny, cold Paris October morning. And ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Of all these mask-makers workshops that existed around Paris 120 years ago, there's only one left.

KRISTEN CLARK: And we're about to visit Lorenzi's

JEREMY GRANGE: Called Lorenzi's.

KRISTEN CLARK: Which is a—which is like a mask-making shop. So I'm gonna—we're coming up to the gate.

SEAN: We asked our friends Kristen Clark and Tamar Tsardoyavitch to drop by there for us.

JEREMY GRANGE: They've still got this incredible workshop, And you go up some rickety, narrow wooden stairs, and you get to the top and there's just banks of faces.

KRISTEN CLARK: Rows and rows of people that look like they're sleeping.

JEREMY GRANGE: Death masks of ...

KRISTEN CLARK: Who is the one at the top there?

JEREMY GRANGE: ... everybody. You know, Napoleon!

CLERK: Napoleon, yeah.

KRISTEN CLARK: Where is ...

JEREMY GRANGE: And Robespierre.

CLERK: Robespierre.

KRISTEN CLARK: Robespierre.

CLERK: Robespierre. He was in the French Revolution.

CLERK: Revolution.

JEREMY GRANGE: Mozart and Beethoven.

CLERK: That's the mask of Chopin, the composer.

JEREMY GRANGE: Looking at you from the wall and from the ceiling.

KRISTEN CLARK: All of their eyes are closed.

JEREMY GRANGE: Face after face after face.

SEAN: And they're all famous.

JEREMY GRANGE: Historical figures. But also among them is ...

SEAN: This girl. She's not a poet, she's not a conqueror, she's not anybody.

JAD: Well she's gotta be somebody, I mean, who is she?

SEAN: Well the story that emerged after she died, and this is maybe fact, but the sources are lost to us, so we're not sure exactly what happened. But she was young.

JEREMY GRANGE: You know, in her early to mid 20s. Came from the countryside.

SEAN: Not from Paris.

JEREMY GRANGE: You know, she was a sort of poor, uneducated woman, but she came to Paris.

SEAN: Meets a man.

JEREMY GRANGE: And there was a love affair.

SEAN: Which then turns sour.

JEREMY GRANGE: The story is that maybe she was pregnant and abandoned, or ...

JAD: Oh ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Or maybe she was just abandoned.

SEAN: She goes to a bridge that's stretching across the Seine, might be the one by the Louvre. Steps to the edge ...

JEREMY GRANGE: And she threw herself into the river and she drowned. And then the body was recovered.

SEAN: She was taken to the morgue, which wasn't that far away. And in those days ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Bodies would be displayed behind glass, and hopefully their relatives, or their friends, would come along and say, "Yes, that's my father, or my sister, or my daughter." And she was this particularly beautiful corpse. And everybody rushed down to see her. And eventually yeah, the guy who ran the morgue took a plaster cast of her face because she was so beautiful.

SEAN: He was just struck by her, just like Laerdal, just like everybody.

JAD: What'd she look like?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JEREMY GRANGE: I wouldn't say a sort of plump face, but a rounded face.

SEAN: She's lovely, but not in a come hither way. She's more like sort of weirdly saintly looking?

JAD: Like she's serene?

ROBERT: Innocent, maybe?

SEAN: Serene, innocent, but also sort of knowing. And she has ...

JEREMY GRANGE: A little smile. If you look at the mask, there's just this little smile playing on the lips. And it's—it's just enough to—to kind make you think, "Well, why's she smiling?" And who is she?

SEAN: And who is she? And the problem was ...

JEREMY GRANGE: She wasn't identified.

JAD: Oh, so they didn't know.

SEAN: No. And so ultimately, people started calling her by this name.

JEREMY GRANGE: The inconnue.

JAD: Inconnue.

ROBERT: Inconnue, inconnue.

JAD: What does that mean?

ROBERT: The un—

SEAN: Well, so you know the word "ingénue," which means "innocent lady," like the character, the ingénue in the movies?

JAD: Uh-huh.

SEAN: This is l'inconnue, which means, "unknown woman."

JEREMY GRANGE: The inconnue de la Seine. The unknown woman of the Seine. And then gradually, the plaster cast worked its way into the mask-makers workshops and out onto the streets of Paris.

SEAN: And it wasn't long before this woman became a sensation, and everyone started writing about her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The face of the young, drowned woman ...]

JEREMY GRANGE: Rilke.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... was beautiful because it smiled. Smiled so deceptively, as though it knew.]

SEAN: Anaïs Nin.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The woman who had drowned herself here years ago, and who was so beautiful that ...]

JEREMY GRANGE: And Nabokov.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Touchingly frail, young shoulders.]

SEAN: Who wrote this entire poem sort of demanding, you know, "Well, who made you jump?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Who was he?]

SEAN: Why? You know, who was the guy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I beseech you, tell me your mysterious seducer. Was he some neighbor's curly-locked nephew of the loud tie and gold-capped tooth?]

SEAN: In any case, this mask is a huge deal. In all, thousands, countless people have it hanging on their wall, the same way you would hang Napoleon on your wall, because he's Napoleon.

ROBERT: Yeah.

SEAN: But they don't know who she is. And that's sort of the point. Like who is she? And everybody's captivated, including our toymaker. Asmund Laerdal.

JEREMY GRANGE: He felt that the inconnue ...

TORE LAERDAL: The attractiveness and the story ...

JEREMY GRANGE: ... would be the right model to use.

SEAN: For the first CPR mannequin in history, who has a name!

JEREMY GRANGE: Resusci Anne.

SEAN: Resusci Anne.

JEREMY GRANGE: Could you describe what we have in front of us here?

TORE LAERDAL: Well, what we see is the very first production model of Resusci Anne from 1960.

JEREMY GRANGE: She's had to—the face is changed slightly, because if you want to do CPR, you have to have an open mouth. So regrettably, the ...

SEAN: The slight smile is now parted.

JAD: Yes.

JEREMY GRANGE: But you've still got the high forehead and the closed eyes.

JAD: Wow.

TORE LAERDAL: And ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Every Resusci Anne CPR mannequin that's produced ...

SEAN: 300 million people have been trained on this thing since it was first introduced in 1960.

JEREMY GRANGE: ... has the face of the inconnue.

SEAN: Still.

JEREMY GRANGE: Still.

TORE LAERDAL: And hopefully she's looking quite attractive.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen ...]

SEAN: The craziest part about it is that ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two ...]

SEAN: ... this face ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven ...]

SEAN: ... of this drowned woman ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.]

SEAN: ... becomes the face that people blow into to learn how to save drowned people.

JAD: [laughs]

SEAN: So it's like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... one, two, three, four ...]

SEAN: It's like over ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... four, five, six, seven, eight ...]

SEAN: ... and over and over again ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... one, two, three, four ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen ...]

SEAN: ... thousands and thousands of people ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... one, two, three, four ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two ...]

SEAN: ... are trying to bring this woman back to life.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: … twenty-three, twenty-four twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.]

ROBERT: That's kind of beautiful, actually.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... four, five, six, seven, eight ...]

JAD: That's kinda nice.

ROBERT: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.]

ROBERT: The only issue maybe is like, every fact you've just given her isn't really given about her. It isn't really a fact.

JAD: Yeah, what do we actually know about this woman?

SEAN: Well, so Jeremy went into his research sort of asking the same question, well what do we ...

ROBERT: Really know?

SEAN: What do we really know that's true?

JEREMY GRANGE: I—I have a horrible suspicion the truth, you know, is that she didn't die.

JAD: What?

JEREMY GRANGE: Yeah. I mean—having shown the mask to Pascal Jacquin, who's a member of the Brigade Fluvial ...

SEAN: This is the river police, whose job it is to pull dead bodies out of the Seine and rescue people from the Seine. And Pascal is in charge, so ...

JEREMY GRANGE: He's seen, you know, hundreds of drowned bodies. He can look at a face and he can know whether that's somebody who's drowned.

SEAN: And he said ...

PASCAL JACQUIN: It's surprising when I saw the picture to see that so peaceful face, just because everyone we've found in the water is never so peaceful.

JEREMY GRANGE: Not to put too fine a point on it, but when somebody's drowned, they start decomposing quite quickly.

PASCAL JACQUIN: They are swollen most of the time. So ...

JEREMY GRANGE: The features that you would have seen in life don't really last very long ...

PASCAL JACQUIN: It's not so nice looking.

JEREMY GRANGE: ... once somebody's been in the water.

JEREMY GRANGE: Do you think she's attractive?

PASCAL JACQUIN: Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah. Just she looks really graceful.

JAD: So if she didn't die, then ...

ROBERT: Who was she then?

SEAN: She may have been a model who somebody thought was pretty and wanted to take a plaster cast of her face, I mean, at that point, it's anybody's guess.

ROBERT: We don't know this?

SEAN: This is our end of knowing.

JAD: It's our end of knowing.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Well, it's frustrating.

SEAN: But maybe it's better that way. I mean, if you don't—like, the reason why she was so captivating is because people don't know and they can just fill this gap with their own stories. They can just sort of sit there and muse about her. In fact ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Uh ...

SEAN: ... Jeremy told me this story about this museum that he went to in Liverpool. It was at the historic house of a photographer there. And ...

JEREMY GRANGE: And in the kind of waiting room, there was the mask of the inconnue, actually, on the wall there. So, you know, slightly disingenuously, I ask the guide, "Oh, what's that?"

SEAN: Very disingenuously [laughs]

JEREMY GRANGE: [laughs] Well ...

SEAN: You knew everything about it at that point.

JEREMY GRANGE: I thought—I thought I'd see. And it was amazing. She told me this story about twins. Two—two girls from Liverpool. And this is—you know—the important bit, from where we were. From the city where we were.

JAD: Not from anywhere near France.

JEREMY GRANGE: Not from anywhere—exactly! And ...

SEAN: The story was almost exactly the same, except this time, one of the twin girls left Liverpool in her late teens or early 20s, made her way to Paris, fell in love, got knocked up, the guy left, she despaired, and then ...

JEREMY GRANGE: Threw herself off the bridge and drowned. And the mask of this beautiful corpse was taken.

SEAN: But this version keeps going after that. Fifty years later, the surviving twin, who never knew what happened to her sister, takes a trip to Paris.

JEREMY GRANGE: Is walking through the streets of Paris and sees this face on the wall and, you know, this time instead of it being her own face, it's the face of her twin sister ...

SEAN: Twin sister.

JEREMY GRANGE: ...who's there. And so her twin who died long before her is kind of kept forever young while she has had to age. And so she's from Liverpool now, as far as ...

SEAN: As far as the Liverpudlians are concerned.

JEREMY GRANGE: Yeah.

SEAN: And I wonder if she's also from Cornwall, as far as the Cornwallians are concerned. And, like ...

ROBERT: Maybe she's like a Muscovite, as far as the people in Moscow are concerned?

SEAN: She's Sicilian, as far as the Sicilians are concerned.

JAD: Maybe she's a Laotian, as far as the Laotians are concerned.

ROBERT: And a Buenos Arian ...

SEAN: Maybe Australian.

JAD: How about Calcuttan, as far as the Calcuttans are concerned.

SEAN: Beirutian, as far as the Beirutians are concerned.

JAD: Let's get a "D" one. Let's get a "D" in here.

ROBERT: Denverite, as far as the Denver people are concerned.

JAD: Denverites. Yep.

ROBERT: Dalatian, as far as people in Dallas ...

JAD: Producer Sean Cole. And before we go, thank you to Jeremy Grange and to our readers, Pike Malonovsky, Marine Boudeau and Jeff Spurgeon.

ROBERT: And special thanks to Lisa Morehouse and Michelle Kanu.

[LISTENER: Hey, my name is Maya from Ralieigh, North Carolina. Hi, Radiolab. I am a Radiolab listener. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Bye, Radiolab!]

 

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