STATUE OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE.
Sometimes my father kept Rodin and Jules Dalou to dinner. The two sculptors were devoted to each other. They were comrades from of old who had traveled together the hard road of beginners; since their student days at the Petite Ecole they had many times reëncountered each other in the same workshops, where they had received the same contemptuous wages for their long days of labor. They felt a profound esteem for each other's talent, different as these talents were, altogether opposed, in fact, as were their natures; and it was a fine, a lovely thing to see them bring forward each other's respective merits. Alas! I shall have to tell later how an artistic rivalry came one day to destroy this noble friendship.
The appearance of "The Burghers of Calais" aroused a flood of enthusiasm in the world of art. I remember it well. At that time I was only a young school-girl, and my father was unwilling to allow me to "miss my classes" in order to accompany him to the opening of the Rodin Exhibition. After all, the lessons I received that day, following them quite absent-mindedly, were they worth the lesson I should have received from the contemplation of that masterpiece, even if my age would have prevented me from quite understanding it? Beauty is always the most fertilizing teacher.
A rich art-lover, acting with the municipal authorities of Calais, had ordered from Rodin the statue of Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the Calais hero whose devotion had in the fourteenth century, during the Hundred Years' War, saved the city when it was besieged by King Edward III of England.
Rodin, true to his principles, sought as ever to approach his subject from the quick of reality. He consulted history. He read the old chronicles of France, above all those of Jean Froissart, who was contemporaneous with the event and almost a witness of it. Froissart was a man of the fourteenth century, a man of the age of the cathedrals, and therefore himself a Gothic. His narrative has the force, the savor, the naïveté, the simple and profound art of the masters of that marvelous epoch. What a source of emotion for Rodin, a Gothic likewise in his faith and his artistic rectitude! He caught fire at the recital of the old master as at the voice of a brother-in-arms. He read, he learned that Edward III would not consent to spare the city of Calais from pillage and destruction unless six of her richest citizens would come out to him dressed only in their shirts, barefoot, with ropes about their necks, bringing him the keys of the city and their own heads to be cut off. In response to this terrible message, Eustache de Saint-Pierre and five of his fellow-citizens, taking counsel with the notables of the place, at once rose to go to the king's camp. They set forth immediately, escorted on their way by the hunger-stricken multitude, weeping and groaning over their sacrifice and "adoring them with pity."
This was the vision which from that time on took possession of Rodin, dominating him and never leaving him. But it was not an isolated person detached from his environment that he saw: it was the six martyrs just as they appeared in history, just as they were in life. In his thought he followed this band of heroes marching to the sacrifice in the midst of the weeping city. He could not bring himself to separate them either from their whole number or from their tragic surroundings. Therefore, in accordance with the genius of his theme, that is to say, with historic truth, he would make all six of them, and he would insist that they should be set up in the midst of the city, among the old houses, where they would continue to live their sublime life in the heart of the very town that they had saved.
For the price of one statue, therefore, Rodin set out to execute six. He rented a vast atelier in the rue des Fourneaux, in the Vaugirard Quarter. He worked unceasingly. To keep this enormous group in good condition, to maintain the proper temperature, he moistened the clay morning and evening, having as his garçon d'atelier no one but his devoted wife, who had become thoroughly experienced in these matters. Despite all, accidents would happen: the clay would give way, an arm, modeled with his habitual exactitude, would fall and have to be laboriously repaired; but the fervent modeler never hesitated in his work, and on the day when he exhibited "The Burghers of Calais" at the house of Georges Petit the praise and the homage that sprang forth from the soul of all true artists recompensed him magnificently, bringing him the intoxicating caress of dawning glory. They spoke, in connection with the "Burghers," of the image-makers of our cathedrals; they spoke of the statues of Claus Sluters, of the famous statues of the "Well of Moses" at Dijon. Really, in the Calais monument Rodin is more than ever under the Gothic influence in subject, in thought, and in execution. The equilibrium of the figures composing the group is the same as that of the "Saint John the Baptist." The long shifts that cover the naked bodies of his heroes recall those draperies in vertical folds dear to the Middle Ages. The very modeling of the figures and of the faces increases this effect of elongation caused by the fall of the fabric; the modeling in large planes, the vigorous accents, the simple and pathetic movements are certainly those of the sort that out-of-door sculpture calls for. In twenty years Rodin had made innumerable visits to the Gothic monuments. Here was the result of his tours of France. He had made them in order to recapture the traditions of art from the hands of our wonderful old stone-cutters, and his heart must have throbbed with joy when he was told that in his own hands that tradition had suffered no loss.
Naturally, the appearance of "The Burghers of Calais," even that, could not fail to have its share of comic anecdote, that bitter and painful humor that marks the adventures of genius in its struggle with vulgarity. Let us not complain too much. The contrast between these adventures and the proud way of life of a great man, the regularity of his hours of toil—it is this that creates opposition, movement, life. The elect soul feels a savage joy in these blows which shake it like a tree tormented by brutal hands, a tree aware of the vigor of its resistance and its ever-increasing tenacity.