He sees very few people and visits nobody. He would baffle visitors accustomed to elegant, literary, well-informed, brilliant artists. His studio in the Rue de l'Université, at the end of an old yard encumbered by blocks of marble and shaded by aged chestnut trees, is like the work-place of a poor beginner. Neither a carpet nor an ornament is to be seen; the stone floor, the bare walls, a few rush chairs, some modelling stands, some cloths, a shabby deal table loaded with papers, sketches piled up on shelves, blouses hanging on nails, a cast-iron stove—these and nothing more are found by the many foreign admirers who come to see Rodin, and whom he receives with invariable amiability amid his assistants at work upon the Hugo monument or upon some smaller piece of marble.
A CORNER OF RODIN'S STUDIO AT MEUDON
Setting aside his journeys to London and Prague and his travels in Germany and Italy, Rodin leads an extremely retired life in Paris, and is rarely to be met. He invariably lunches at his own house at Meudon, then goes to the Rue de L'Université to work, and goes home again to dinner. Formerly, before he had his house at Meudon, he used to lunch at a café in the Place de L'Alma, where he was to be seen for twenty years, and to which people used to go to see him, rather as people go to see Ibsen in Christiania. The house, of a sixteenth-century style, that Rodin has inhabited at Meudon since 1900, is situated amid vineyards, and stands alone at the end of a sort of cliff, overlooking all Paris, the Seine, and the Bois de Boulogne, and facing the wooded heights of Saint Cloud and Bellevue. The site is open and fine; Rodin enjoys immense expanses of sky, sunsets, storms, and moonlight nights that delight him. The house is spacious, light, furnished with extreme simplicity, and adorned by a few pictures, the works of friends (in particular his portraits by Sargent and Legros). Rodin has added to it the pavilion in iron and glass, in which he exhibited all his work, at the Rond-point de l'Alma, in the exhibition of 1900. This pavilion, rebuilt and full of brilliant sunlight, contains all the artist's statuary. There are also several small studios, in which Rodin has his marble rough-hewn, keeps the casts of his statues or accumulates the collections of bronzes, marbles, antique or Gothic, and fragments which he is never tired of finding out and buying. In this place, which, after a life of difficulties and worries, Rodin has been able to purchase, he leads a life that fully suits his tastes, among beautiful trees and flowers, with a majestic landscape before him. It is touching to see the man, here, amid the enormous mass of his work, a whole world of statues, with which he lives and which sums up all his labours and all his existence. A photograph which I am able to add to the illustrations of this volume will give a partial idea of that surprising and imposing cohort of figures in clay, marble, and bronze—that impassioned or tragic throng. Rodin receives very few visitors at Meudon—hardly any but old friends, and he spends his mornings in his garden or in his light and cheerful studio drawing or superintending his workmen. It is chiefly at Meudon that he prepares his rough drafts, the main lines of his compositions; and in order to see an effect he will often hastily put together with clay some of the plaster limbs that he keeps in a number of glass cases—quite an anatomical museum in fact, filling a whole storey, and containing hundreds of pieces and of attitudes piled together.
