How the story of ‘the girl of 100 portraits’ inspired two books

For almost eight decades the artists’ model Louise Cansot, the subject of the novel winning France’s most prestigious literary prize this year, was one of Paris’s forgotten murder victims.

After her body was found near the Seine in September 1949, city police wrote off the young woman, immortalised as “the girl of 100 portraits”, as loose, libertine and – worse – an unmarried mother. They closed their investigation after just four months having made little effort to find her killer.

But long before the author Philippe Jaenada began researching his, Prix Goncourt-winning novel, L’Inconnue du Quai de Javel (The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel), another writer from the Breton village where Cansot was born had already spent decades researching her story.

Luc Corlouër might have felt aggrieved but in a rare show of literary solidarity, the two writers decided they would both publish books. As part of what he calls “the deal”, Corlouër handed Jaenada his notes.

“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. “By giving him the subject I knew he would make a really superb book. He is a great novelist.”

Cansot, nicknamed Lise, was born in Tréguier, on the Côtes-d’Armor in north-west France, the daughter of a shoe repairer. In 1937, aged 16, she left her family and moved to Paris where her beauty attracted the attention of the celebrated Montparnasse artists, who jostled to have her pose for them.

When war broke out and most of the artists fled south, Cansot remained in Paris working as a film extra, waiter and dancer at the Folies Bergère. She had a five-year-old daughter, Nathalie, whom she left with a nanny in the suburbs until she could raise the money for an apartment, but with the painters gone and no steady income, her situation became increasingly desperate.

On 7 September 1949, her body was found on the Quai du Javel, now known as the Quai André-Citroën, in the 15th arrondissement, south-west of the Eiffel Tower. Detectives initially identified four possible murderers but rapidly filed the case as unsolved.

Jaenada, the author of 17 novels, discovered the story while looking through old newspapers in the French National Library.

By then, Corlouër had already amassed maps, images, photos, paintings, documents, letters and newspaper cuttings on Cansot. His book, La Tragédie du plus beau modèle de Paris (The Tragedy of the Most Beautiful Paris Model) was finally published on 19 August – the same date as Jaenada’s novel – and is based on the documentary information about the case and the victim.

Corlouër says his interest in Cansot was piqued in 1981, when he met an elderly woman at the war memorial in Tréguier. “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.

“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” and newspaper reports speculated that she was a sex worker, alcoholic or drug addict.

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

Corlouër said it was unsurprising the police had not made the same effort to find the killer back then.

“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 he and Jaenada had 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.

Corlouër also revealed how the authors traced Cansot’s daughter Nathalie, now 80, who was raised by another sister, Valentine.

“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.”