The heroine of Robert Doisneau’s Baiser de l’H?tel de Ville, the archetypal photograph of Paris’s most archetypal open-air activity, has decided to sell her original print at auction half a century after it was taken.

　　Franoise Bornet, a former actor who performed the kiss with her real-life then boyfriend, Jacques Carteaud, 55 years ago, said the print, which bears the photographer’s stamp, would go under the hammer on August 25.

　　She said Doisneau, who died in 1994, had sent it to her a few days after taking the photograph as part of an assignment for America’s Life magazine, which had asked him for pictures of young lovers in Paris.

　　The picture of a young, tousle-haired man planting a kiss on the lips of a slender girl became a global symbol of Paris romance in 1986, when it came out as a poster, selling 410,000 copies in the next five years.

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