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

Luc Corlouër made ‘deal’ with Prix Goncourt winner Philippe Jaenada over his research into model Louise Cansot, murdered in Paris in 1949

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.