You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett Read Free Book Online Page A

cracked off and shattered on the floor. When Rodin went to work one morning and saw the mess, he stared at it fora long while and then decided it actually looked better this way. The mask now bore the reality of Bibi and Rodin’s impoverishment on its surface, expressing the coldness of life in a most literal way.
    Rodin submitted the work to the 1864 salon as a mask rather than a bust, but jurors rejected it that year, and again the following year. Rodin did not take the news as hard as he might have in the past. He knew the sculpture marked a crucial revelation, whether anyone else realized it or not. Bibi had taught Rodin that beauty was about truth, not perfection. “There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character . . .” he would conclude. The human being, flawed creature that it is, cannot relate to perfection. But people can empathize with scars, wrinkles and lines, which together add up to the semblance of a lifetime.
    â€œThe mask determined all my future work,” Rodin later said. “It was the first good piece of modeling I ever did.” As he started to acknowledge his talent, he also realized that it came, like many gifts, with a catch. Artistic gifts had to be shared with others or else they lost their worth. The burden fell on him to find an audience and to make seen that which is inherently invisible. As such, many gifts go unrealized, while the gifted go on suffering, carrying the absence inside them like an unreturned love. Rodin, like Rilke, spent his youth crushed under the weight of his gift’s imperative. It was not until 1864 that he met the woman who would act as his witness and committed guardian for life.
    ROSE BEURET WAS EIGHTEEN and already a seasoned laborer when she met the twenty-four-year-old sculptor in 1864. She had recently moved from her family’s vineyard in Champagne to take a job as a seamstress. Down the street from Rodin’s studio, Beuret was stitching flowers to adorn ladies’ hats while he was sculpting them out of stone for a new opera house, the Théâtre de la Gaîté, which was being built to replace the one Haussmann tore down on the Boulevard du Temple, or, as it had become known, the “Boulevard of Crime.”
    Beuret had dusty brown hair that curled around the edges ofher bonnet. She had a tough, tense face and easily agitated eyes that impressed Rodin from the start. “She didn’t have the grace of city women, but all the physical vigor and firm flesh of a peasant’s daughter, and that lively, frank, definite masculine charm which augments the beauty of a woman’s body.” He invited her to model for him at once. Beuret, probably welcoming the extra income and a friend in the city, gladly agreed.
    She came to the job as “tough as a cannon ball,” Rodin said. She posed in his cold studio for hours with one arm stretched downward, as if setting a mirror on a nightstand, and the other sweeping up her hair. “I had put into her all that was in myself,” he said of the figure he made in Beuret’s likeness, which was to become his first life-sized figure, titled Bacchante . Rodin worked on it on Sundays and in the mornings before reporting to his job sculpting clay maquettes for the popular Romantic artist Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. While he was saving the money to have Bacchante cast, he set it aside and moved on to other projects. Eventually, he filled his studio and needed to relocate to a larger space. As the movers carried his patient Bacchante away, the figure started to wobble in their arms and fell to the floor. When Rodin heard the crash he ran toward the sound and, to his horror, saw that “my poor bacchante was dead.”
    The flesh-and-blood Beuret would not depart so easily, however. After her first modeling session, “she attached herself to me like an animal,” Rodin said. The pair soon became lovers and formed a formidable partnership