According to a French story, a drowned girl's body was recovered from France's Seine River sometime in the late 1800s. Her body, displayed in a Parisian mortuary in an attempt to identify her, captured the imagination of one of the mortuary's pathologists. So, he had a sculptor take a plaster cast of her face. The beautiful, enigmatic mask—named "L'Inconnue de la Seine" ("The unknown woman of the Seine")—was soon for sale among artists and writers who found it a muse for their work. In fact, no fashionable European living room of the late 1800s was complete without a mask of the Inconnue on the wall.

But her image didn't stop there. And this is where the story gets really interesting: In 1955 Asmund Laerdal saved the life of his drowning young son, grabbing the boy's motionless body from the water just in time and clearing his airways.

Laerdal at that time was a successful Norwegian toy manufacturer, specializing in making children's dolls and model cars from the new generation of soft plastics. When he was approached to make a training aid for the newly-invented technique of CPR, his son's brush with death a few years earlier made him very receptive.

He developed a mannequin which simulates an unconscious patient requiring CPR. Remembering the mask on the wall of his grandparents' house many years earlier, he decided that "The unknown woman of the Seine" would become the face of Resusci Anne. She has a pleasant, attractive face, with the hint of a smile playing on her lips. Her eyes are closed but they look as if they might spring open at any moment.

So, if you're one of the 300 million people who's been trained in CPR, you've almost certainly had your lips pressed to the Inconnue's.

Possible Preaching Angle:

How like God's work of redemption this is: to take the very worst things imaginable—like the horror of death—and make something new that would save countless lives. This is what God did for us on the cross, which we remember each Easter and Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:26). The difference between the cross and the “unknown lady” is that our Lord was raised triumphantly from the grave and we serve a risen Lord (1 Cor. 15:1-58).