As he got older, (not that 'Old Benjamin' ever got the chance to get really old), Benjamin became more and more obsessed with a small wax figure of a scantily clad young girl adjusting her garter (here illustrated with a more contemporary image), which he’d seen in the Musee Gravin, in Paris. During his last months in Paris he would go and visit the figure frequently. He was regularly to be seen staring at her. He claimed he was so interested in her because he saw her as “the embodiment of history. She is unchanged, defying organic decay. She becomes a representation of the afterlife."
