I
The day before the vernissage (varnishing day), I met Auguste Rodin at the Salon de la Société Nationale in Paris. He was accompanied by two of his pupils, themselves past-masters: the sculptor Bourdelle, who was this year exhibiting a fierce Hercules piercing the Stymphalian birds with his arrows, and Despiau, who models exquisitely clever busts.
All three had stopped before a figure of the god Pan, which Bourdelle had whimsically carved in the likeness of Rodin, and the creator of the work was excusing himself for the two small horns which he had set upon the master’s forehead.
“You had to do it,” Rodin replied, laughing, “because you are representing Pan. Michael Angelo gave just such horns to his Moses. They are the emblem of omnipotence and omniscience, and I assure you that I am flattered to have been so favored by your attentions.”
As it was now noon, Rodin invited us all three to lunch with him somewhere in the neighborhood.
We passed out into the Avenue des Champs Élysées, where beneath the crude young green of the chestnut-trees the motors and carriages slipped by in shining files, all the brilliance of Parisian life flashing here from its brightest and most fascinating setting.
“Where are we going to lunch?” Bourdelle asked, pausing with comical anxiety. “In the big restaurants about here we shall be waited upon by solemn men-servants in dress-coats, which I cannot bear. They frighten me. I advise some quiet little restaurant where the cabbies go.”
La France
By Rodin
Presented to the people of the United States of America by the French nation for the base of the Champlain Monument at Crown Point
“The food is really better there than in these gorgeous places,” Despiau declared. “Here the food is too sophisticated.”
He had expressed Bourdelle’s secret thought; for Bourdelle, in spite of his pretended modesty, is a gourmand.
Rodin agreeing, allowed them to lead him to a little eating-house hidden in a side-street off the Champs Élysées, where we chose a quiet corner and installed ourselves comfortably.
Despiau, who has a lively disposition, began teasing Bourdelle. “Help yourself, Bourdelle,” he said, passing him a dish, “though you know you don’t deserve to be fed, because you are an artist—that is to say, of no use to any one.”
“I pardon you this impertinence,” Bourdelle answered, “because you take half for yourself.” He began gayly, but ended in a momentary crisis of pessimism, as he added: “But I won’t contradict you. It is true that we are good for nothing. When I think of my father, who was a stonecutter, I say to myself, ‘His work was necessary to society. He prepared the building materials for men’s houses.’ I can see him now, good old man, conscientiously sawing his blocks of freestone, winter and summer, in the open workshop. His was a rugged type such as we do not see nowadays. But I—but we—what service do we render to our kind? We are jugglers, mountebanks, dreamers, who amuse the people in the market-place. They scarcely deign to take an interest in our efforts. Few people are capable of understanding them. And I do not know whether we really deserve their good-will, for the world could very well get on without us.”