Louise Cansot, the ‘girl of 100 portraits,’ and a murder revisited

By Elena Vasquez

Two books about Louise Cansot appeared on the same date, 19 August. Philippe Jaenada’s 530-page L’Inconnue du Quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel) won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize. Luc Corlouër published La Tragédie du plus beau modèle de Paris (The Tragedy of the Most Beautiful Paris Model) on the same day.

Police found Cansot’s body on 7 September 1949 on Quai du Javel, now Quai André-Citroën, in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, south-west of the Eiffel Tower. Detectives initially identified four possible murderers, then rapidly closed the case as unsolved after four months.

The police wrote her off as loose, libertine and an unmarried mother, then made little effort to find her killer. For almost eight decades, she remained one of Paris’s forgotten murder victims.

What made Louise Cansot the “girl of 100 portraits”?

Called Lise, Cansot was born in Tréguier, Côtes-d’Armor, in north-west France. Her father repaired shoes. In 1937, at 16, she left for Paris, where Montparnasse’s celebrated artists jostled to have her pose.

When war broke out, most artists fled south. Cansot remained in Paris as a film extra, waiter and dancer at the Folies Bergère. She left her five-year-old daughter, Nathalie, with a nanny in the suburbs while trying to save for an apartment. With painters gone and no steady income, her situation grew increasingly desperate.

Long before Jaenada began researching, fellow Tréguier writer Corlouër had spent decades assembling maps, images, photographs, paintings, documents, letters and newspaper cuttings about the model’s life and death. Jaenada, author of 17 novels, found the case in old newspapers at the French National Library. Corlouër handed over his notes as part of what he calls “the deal.” His book draws on that documentary record.

They agreed that both would publish separate books.

“We agreed we would write our respective books, which are very different. And after all, the star was him, not me,” Corlouër told the Guardian. “He is a great novelist.”

Takeaway: The collaboration pooled Corlouër’s evidence while preserving two distinct treatments of Cansot.

How did the books challenge the police account?

Corlouër said an elderly woman at Tréguier’s war memorial prompted his inquiry in 1981. She first spoke of Annick Cansot and then of Louise’s murder.

“She told me one name was of a local girl, Annick Cansot, run over by a German truck during the war. When I said: ‘How terrible,’, she said even worse was that her older sister had been murdered in Paris.”

“I decided I had to know about Louise Cansot and what happened to her, so I began researching, but my book was a failure. It was a novel about a murder investigation that did not identify the murderer. It was rejected by one publisher after another.”

Corlouër’s account then turns to Jaenada:

“I thought there was only one person capable of writing such a book: Philippe Jaenada, whom I had already met at a literary salon. Then one day he contacted me. He told me he was interested in the case but said he wouldn’t do anything without me.”

“So, I entrusted him with my research. I gave it to him and he did the best investigation imaginable. He dissected all the information and found things I didn’t even think of.”

The original 300-page police report on Cansot’s murder concluded that she was a woman of “ill repute.” Contemporary newspaper reports speculated that she was a sex worker, alcoholic or drug addict.

Jaenada’s 530-page novel gives Cansot a more sympathetic portrayal and suggests the name of the man he believes strangled her after inviting her to visit a flat she hoped to rent. His research included reading 74 of the 75 novels by Georges Simenon featuring Inspector Maigret in 1940s Paris.

Corlouër said it was unsurprising that the police had not made the same effort to find the killer in 1949.

“Lise was a very modern girl at least 50 years ahead of her time,” he said.

“She dressed well, was intelligent and free in her choice of lovers. But when she was killed, what journalists and the police saw was a young woman who was a bit libertine, had a baby out of wedlock, had jobs they didn’t think were proper jobs and posed for painters. To them, she had brought what happened on herself.”

Corlouër said the two authors wanted to rehabilitate Cansot’s reputation after 77 years of slander.

“In the police report it’s more or less written that she deserved it. And the defamation continued after her murder,” he said.

Takeaway: Jaenada’s evidence-led narrative challenges the assumptions embedded in the 300-page police file.

What did Cansot’s daughter remember?

Corlouër said the authors traced Cansot’s daughter Nathalie, now 80, who was raised by another sister, Valentine, and had spent years hearing that her mother was disreputable.

“I don’t want to say too much because it would spoil the end of Philippe’s novel, but when we found her, the first thing she said was she didn’t want to hear a word about her mother and that Lise was a prostitute,” Corlouër said.

“She was raised by her aunt, who was very jealous of Lise and who for years told the girl her mother was disreputable. Nathalie was very surprised when Philippe and I told her this was not true, that her mother was an amazing woman.

“When she heard this, she did not cry. She’s tough like her mother, but she was amazed. So there is a kind of happy ending to this tragic story.”

Takeaway: If the two books endure, Cansot’s corrected reputation may finally outlast the police judgment that she had brought her death upon herself.