Rodin told me under what circumstances he knew Falguière.
“It was,” he said, “when the Société des Gens de Lettres refused my Balzac. Falguière, to whom the order was then given, insisted on showing me, by his friendship, that he did not at all agree with my detractors. Actuated by sympathy I offered to do his bust. He considered it a great success when it was finished—he even defended it, I know, against those who criticised it in his presence; and, in his turn, he did my bust, which is very fine.”
Study Head, for the Statue of Balzac
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Study for a Head, presumably Madame R.
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
As I was turning away I caught sight of a copy in bronze of the bust of Berthelot. Rodin made it only a year before the death of the great chemist. The great scholar rests in the knowledge of his work accomplished. He meditates. He is alone, face to face with himself; alone, face to face with the crumbling of ancient faiths; alone before nature, some of whose secrets he has penetrated, but which remains so immensely mysterious; alone at the edge of the infinite abyss of the skies; and his tormented brow, his lowered eyes, are filled with melancholy. This fine head is like the emblem of modern intelligence, which, satiated with knowledge, weary of thought, ends by demanding “What is the use?”
All the busts which I had been admiring and about which my host had been talking now grouped themselves in my mind, and they appeared to me as a rich treasure of documents upon our epoch.
“If Houdon,” I said, “has written memoirs of the eighteenth century, you have written those of the end of the nineteenth. Your style is more harsh, more violent than that of your predecessor, your expressions are less elegant, but more natural and more dramatic, if I may say so.
“The scepticism which in the eighteenth century was distinguished and full of raillery has become, in you, rough and sharp. Houdon’s people were more sociable, yours are more self-centred. Those of Houdon criticised the abuses of a régime, yours seem to question the value of human life itself and to feel the anguish of unrealized desires.”