(Annabella & Nicolas Koline)
In Napoléon, Violine is a fictitious character created by Gance to showcase the hero-worship for General Bonaparte. For the part, he hired a young girl aged 18 who had never made a film. She was called Suzanne Charpentier. He named her Annabella in reference to an Edgar Allan Poe poem. So Annabella's career in cinema started with this film. Her part was rather pruned by Gance for the premiere of the film. She felt distraught when she saw how little of her part remained on the screen.
In the course of reading vintage magazines, I made a real discovery. I found two pages of frame enlargements of a scene I had never seen or heard of. This is Violine (Annabella) on the verge of being lynched by a mob. As there was no less than 12 photos, I was able to make a gif animation. It shows a powerful scene. So far, this scene is among the lost scenes of Napoléon (with quite a few others).
If you are interested, I posted the animation (along with several screen caps of Annabella as Violine) on my Blog .