MINERVA.
When the clocks of the Sorbonne quarter struck noon, Rodin left the Petite Ecole; he walked to the Louvre, eating, as he went, a roll and a cake of chocolate which was all he had for lunch. He sketched the antiques. From there he went on to the Galerie des Estampes at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they loaned out, without any too much good will, misplaced as that is with students, the albums of plates after Michelangelo and Raphael and the great illustrated work, "L'Histoire de Costume Romain." Because of this miserliness of theirs, he did not always obtain the volumes he wished for, which were reserved for habitués who were better known. This did not prevent him from becoming initiated into the science of draperies. He executed hundreds of sketches from memory, at last developing in himself the faculty of remembering forms. From the rue de Richelieu, always on foot, he would repair to the Gobelin manufactory. There each day, from five to eight o'clock, he followed the course in design. Placed before nature itself, before the nude, he absorbed more excellent principles. The teaching of the eighteenth century was practised there also, and his work became permanently impregnated by it.
In the morning, at daybreak, before going to the Petite Ecole, he found the time to walk to an old painter's he knew, where he kept a number of canvases going. In the evening he made careful copies of the sketches he had jotted down at noon in the galleries of the Louvre and the Bibliothèque. He drew far into the night; he drew even during supper, at the frugal board of his family, surrounded by his father, his mother, and his young sister, bending over his paper utterly regardless of his health, a course of things that soon brought on gastric disorders from which he suffered cruelly. In short, he toiled incessantly, ardent and patient, obstinate, and full of self-confidence.
Assuredly he never in the world imagined that he was to become in time one of the most illustrious representatives of the French art of the nineteenth century, that he was to be the equal in renown of celebrities like Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, or Michelet whom he saw occasionally in the Luxembourg Gardens, without even daring to bow to them; but he possessed a fixed and a precise idea of what was required to be a good sculptor and the resolution to realize it. Little did he care how long it would take, how tardy success might prove, how slow fortune might be in coming; little did he care for obstacles, even for misery. He was going the right way, unhesitating, untroubled, not compromising with himself or with anybody. He possessed the irresistible will of a force.
I have had occasion to examine one of the note-books of Rodin's youth. It is quite filled with sketches after engravings from the antique, animals or human figures. The drawing is strangely compact, wilful, for the boy of sixteen or seventeen that he was then. Already, in its accumulation of strokes and hatchings which, during an entire period of his artistic development, render the drawing of Rodin restless and personal like a piece of writing, it exhibits an obstinate search for relief, it speaks to us like hieroglyphics, revealing the power of his grasp. His progress was rapid. At seventeen, he finished his first studies. The moment came for him to pass from the school of decorative arts to that of the Beaux-Arts and to prepare himself, like his companions, for the examinations and for the competition for the prix de Rome, the famous prix de Rome that seemed to Rodin, inexperienced student as he was, the crown of the most rigorous artistic studies.