SEQUANA

Paris, late 19th century. The Seine washes up the body of a young woman, brought to the morgue at Quai de l'Archevêché. No trace of violence, but a detail unsettles all who discover her: her face, far from showing the horror expected of a drowned woman, bears a serene, almost happy smile, as if she knew something no one else knew. A craftsman, struck by this beauty, takes a plaster cast of her face. The mask spreads across Paris, then across Europe: she would be called the L'Inconnue de la Seine, the Mona Lisa of suicide, an image that would haunt generations of artists without ever revealing who she truly was.

It is this woman, or her ghost, whom I imagined rising from the depths to find a beggar playing the accordion on the quays one evening. She pulls him beneath the water into a sunken world where upper-world laws no longer apply—a magnificent and menacing submerged city. When he resurfaces, nothing indicates whether he truly traversed that world or simply fell asleep on the quay, lulled by the lapping water and the cold.