Isadora Duncan in Deauville, Calvados (14)

The plaque here reminds us that Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) was the founder of modern dance, and informs us that she stayed at the 'Villa Black and White' from August to October 1914. It calls her, and I translate, 'an audacious woman with an exceptional fate': the exceptional fate being her tragic death by accidental strangulation with her own scarf?

Isadora Duncan: Père Lachaise Columbarium #2

The urn of Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) is one of the most famous here, no doubt not just because of her revolutionary dancing style but also in part because of the fascination with her unconventional and tragic life. Writers and artists were inspired by her, such John Cowper Powys's Élise Angel in After My Fashion (1980), or Antoine Bourdelle's sculptures.

Duncan married the deeply troubled Russian poet Sergueï Essénine – a man eighteen years her junior – although the marriage was very short-lived and a few years after his return to Russia he killed himself. Famously, Duncan was killed by strangulation from her scarf caught in a car wheel at Nice. She joined her two children killed in Paris in 1913 when the car they were in ran into the Seine.