The advent of mechanical reproduction allowed the mask to be copied and sold on a massive scale. By the 1920s, it was a ubiquitous fixture on parlour walls across France and Germany. Albert Camus, who had a copy hung on the wall of his studio, called her a “drowned Mona Lisa”. Widely replicated in plaster, wax and then plastic, L’Inconnue’s dead face was used as a model for artists at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and apprentices at beautician training schools. Vladimir Nabokov wrote about her in a 1934 poem: “amidst pale crowds of drowned young maidens/you’re the palest and sweetest of all”. She had become an erotic ideal. An entire generation of German schoolgirls is said to have modelled their looks on her.