Dark Lady Laughs...

...and lights her candles one by one - 123 of them, actually, for today is the birthday of French cinema's seminal femme fatale, the enchantingly mononymous Musidora. 

The original Irma Vep gave Theda Bara (and how often do you get two anagrammatical names in one sentence?  This kind of prose don't come cheap, kids) more than a run for her money in the vamp department, leavening her lethal allure with both stunts and humor, two things that weren't poor Theodosia's long suit, as it were.  She even outlived her American coeval by two years.  If so inclined, you can catch a brief but startlingly effective glimpse of her here.