In fact, in his impatience to enjoy this keen artistic pleasure, Rodin has not followed the usual and logical method which consists in raising all parts of a building at once. Up to the present time he has rebuilt only one side of the château, and when you approach to look through the iron entrance gate, you see only broken ground where lines of stones indicate the plan of the building to be. Truly a château of dreams! An artist’s château!
“Verily,” murmured my host, “those old architects were great men, especially when one compares them with their unworthy successors of to-day!”
So speaking, he drew me to a point on the terrace from which the outline of the façade seemed to him most beautiful.
“See,” he cried, “how harmoniously the silhouette cuts the silvery sky, and how it dominates the valley which lies below us.”
Lost in ecstasy, his loving gaze enveloped this monument of a day that is past and all the landscape.
Eve
By Rodin
From the height on which we stood our eyes took in an immense expanse. There, below, the Seine, mirroring long lines of tall poplars, traces a great loop of silver as it rushes towards the solid bridge at Sèvres.... Still further, the white spire of Saint-Cloud against a green hillside, the blue heights of Suresnes and Mont Valerian seem powdered with a mist of dreams.
To the right, Paris, gigantic Paris, spreads away to the horizon her great seed plot, sown with innumerable houses, so small in the distance that one might hold them in the palm of one’s hand. Paris, vision at once monstrous and sublime, colossal crucible wherein bubbles unceasingly that strange mixture of pains and pleasures, of active forces and of fevered ideals!
Paul Gsell.