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  A fear of contagions bred citywide panic, and soon panic itself became a disease. As medical schools began to introduce a condition known as hysteria, thought to be caused by the uterus, more than five thousand mentally ill, epileptic, poor or otherwise incurable women in Paris were banished to the Salpêtrière, a former gunpowder factory turned hospital next door to the Jardin des Plantes.

  Some would have called it a death factory. “Behind those walls, a particular population lives, swarms, and drags itself around: old people, poor women, reposantes awaiting death on a bench, lunatics howling their fury or weeping their sorrow in the insanity ward or the solitude of the cells . . . It is the Versailles of pain,” wrote the journalist Jules Claretie. Patients slept three or four to a bed. Its own director called it “the great emporium of misery.”

  Presiding over this hell was Jean-Martin Charcot, the founding father of neurology, who earned the nickname “Napoleon of Neuroses.” He transformed the Salpêtrière from a “wilderness of paralyses, spasms and convulsions” into a leading teaching and research hospital. Charcot was a brilliant scientist, but he bellowed from the pulpit of his morning lectures like a snake-oil salesman. Crowds lined up early to see him conduct live hypnotisms and tame hysterical women onstage.

  In 1885, Charcot’s lectures attracted a young neurologist from Vienna, Sigmund Freud. “Charcot was perfectly fascinating: each of his lectures was a little masterpiece in construction and composition, perfect in style, and so impressive that the words spoken echoed in one’s ears, and the subject demonstrated remained before one’s eyes for the rest of the day,” he said. Freud’s studies with Charcot derailed him from his research-based track and he returned to Vienna ready to embark on a clinical path. He spread Charcot’s theories on hysteria to his colleagues and would soon incorporate them into his own invention, psychoanalysis.

  Freud described Charcot as a visuel, “a man who sees.” Because Charcot had been unable to pinpoint a neurological basis of hysteria, he focused instead on its symptoms—on the way it looked. He diagnosed by intuition. An amateur artist, Charcot drew illustrations of some of hysteria’s most common manifestations: contorted facial expressions, convulsive tics, strained postures. Charcot accumulated so many casts and illustrations of tormented bodies during his career that he eventually opened the Charcot Museum, one of several anatomical museums that were launched in response to the growing fascination with disease and decay in those days. The institutional context lent a scientific authority to a process of observation and representation that might otherwise have been considered purely artistic.

  Seeking to bridge this gap between art and science, Charcot wrote a book diagnosing characters in historical paintings and, by extension, the artists themselves. His disciple Max Nordau went on to become a best-selling author with a book that similarly medicalized degenerate art. He claimed that the Impressionists were hysterics with dull vision and stunted color perception, which explained why Puvis de Chavannes painted in “whitewash” and Paul-Albert Besnard used “screaming” primary colors.

  Gradually, hysteria shifted from a purely clinical condition to a cultural one. Zola wrote twenty novels about the nervous decline of a family in his Rougon-Macquart series. Rodin’s vision of Dante’s hell in the Gates mirrored the realities of life in Paris at the fin de siècle. The twisted figures pantomimed Charcot’s illustrations of agonized ambivalence and neuroses. In Rodin’s inferno, the inhabitants were everymen living in a nightmare of their own earthly passions. Love was war, desire undid reason. To him, hell had nothing to do with justice; punishment was the condition of the living.

  ALL THROUGHOUT HIS drawn-out heartbreak with Camille Claudel, Rodin was meant to be working on the monument to Balzac. He had promised to deliver it within eighteen months, but it ultimately took him seven years. He had started with a series of naturalist studies of Balzac, but threw them all out when he decided that the man’s physical appearance did not adequately express his genius. It was the same false start he had made with The Thinker, in which he had attempted to portray the writer, Dante, rather than the mind behind it.

  In another version, Rodin tried to convey the essential nature of Balzac’s creativity with a nude version of the man gripping himself at the source of masculine “creation,” but nudity seemed too disrespectful. Still another pose looked too academic. The neck was too weak at first, then too strong. At last Rodin concluded that draping Balzac in his dressing gown was the only truthful way to depict him.

  “Does an inspired writer dress otherwise when at night he walks feverishly in his apartment in pursuit of his private vision?” Rodin explained to one of his biographers. “I had to show a Balzac in his study, breathless, hair in disorder, eyes lost in dream . . . there is nothing more beautiful than the absolute truth of real existence.”

  Rodin’s statue was once again too truthful, however, for many of those who attended its debut at the 1898 Salon de la Société Nationale. The Balzac was billed as one of the event’s top attractions and lured many of the author’s fans who might not otherwise have visited the art show. But to their horror, they found not their beloved littérateur posing obediently with a book in hand, but a colossal monster—with something very different in his hand. Rodin’s Balzac had meaty lips, sagging jowls and a belly that bulged out from under a shapeless bathrobe. Critics were gleefully appalled: Was it a melting snowman? A slab of beef? A penguin? A lump of coal? they asked. Why was he wearing a hospital gown? And was he fondling himself under that robe?

  Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, as photographed by Edward Steichen in 1908.

  It was too much even for those who wanted to give Rodin the benefit of the doubt. “Help me find something beautiful in these goiters, these growths, these hysterical distortions!” wrote one critic of his attempt to see what Rodin’s followers saw. Alas, “I did not, and I’ve covered my forehead with ashes. I shall never belong to the Religion.”

  The members of the society that commissioned the work—with whom Zola had pleaded to maintain patience and faith during the years of delays—rejected it on the spot.

  Rodin’s friends again rushed to his defense. Monet praised the “absolutely beautiful and great sculpture” and urged Rodin to ignore tous ces imbéciles. Its head was “gorgeous,” said Oscar Wilde. Toulouse-Lautrec, Maillol, Debussy, Baudelaire and Anatole France also added public declarations of their support. Noticeably absent from this chorus was Zola, who did not sign the letter expressing “the hope that in a country as noble and refined as France, Rodin would not cease to be treated with the consideration and respect to which his great integrity and admirable career entitle him.”

  By now Zola was retired from his post at the society and thoroughly embroiled in a scandal of his own. The French military had sent an innocent Jewish army general to a penal colony on Devil’s Island four years earlier on the charge of treason. But an investigation revealed that the man convicted, Alfred Dreyfus, was not the spy and had been framed by an anti-Semitic intelligence chief trying to protect the real culprit and the military’s reputation.

  Zola wrote an impassioned four-thousand-word exposé demanding that Dreyfus’s case be reopened. The newspaper L’Aurore published it on its front page under the headline “J’Accuse!” The explosive letter polarized intellectuals in France into bitterly opposing factions. Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Paul Valéry sided with conservatives in their case against Dreyfus, while Monet and Marcel Proust supported Zola, who became the face of the pro-Dreyfusard left. When a court sentenced Zola to a year in prison for libel, he fled to England.

  The debate raged on for more than a decade, yet Rodin never once spoke out in support of his old friend and ally. It is unclear whether Rodin espoused anti-Semitic views or simply wished to remain apolitical. He almost never voiced opinions about news that did not directly affect him. Friends were often astounded at the things he did not know about contemporary culture, like who Charles Darwin was. Sometimes his ignorance offended them, as it did Zola,
who never forgave Rodin for failing to support him during the worst years of his life.

  Oddly, the Balzac benefited from Rodin’s association with Zola all the same. Many of the sculptor’s biggest supporters were pro-Dreyfusards who did not know about his falling-out with Zola. Many came to see the embattled Balzac as a symbol of the wrongfully accused and associated it with Dreyfus. Private collectors began making Rodin offers to buy the sculpture, while an English artist society tried to convince Rodin to let them show it in London.

  In the end Rodin had the last word. He decided not sell Balzac at all. He issued a statement saying that the work was too important to him and “I have made up my mind to remain the sole possessor of my statue.” Although he admitted that the society’s decision not to buy it would cause him “financial disaster,” he claimed he was too old to defend his art anymore.

  IT IS PLAUSIBLE THAT Rodin refused to “defend” his art not because he was too old, but because he knew he didn’t really have to. The French may not yet have embraced him wholeheartedly, but the English adored him more than ever. The year of the Balzac debut, England was home to ten casts of the Man with the Broken Nose, while no one in France owned one. Meanwhile, the patron William Rothenstein, who would become one of the artist’s greatest champions in England, organized a show of Rodin’s erotic drawings to go on view the following year at his new London gallery. Rothenstein found the works both classical and prophetic, anticipating a dimension of sculpture that not even Rodin had yet dared to broach.

  The English also placed a higher value on bust portraiture then. “Motor cars and hunters are passing things and drop into wreckage: but a bust outlasts Rome,” the London writer George Moore told Lady Nancy Cunard, urging her to order one quick, for Rodin was aging. “When Rodin’s hand begins to fail and his eye begins to see less clearly there will be no more sculpture. The opinion of every artist is that no sculpture has been done since antiquity that for beauty of execution can compare with Rodin’s,” Moore said.

  Young English artists began migrating to Paris to study with the maitre. Alphonse Legros, Rodin’s old friend and classmate under Lecoq, was now a professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, and he helped connect his Paris-bound students with Rodin for private tutoring. Among them was the English poet Robert Browning’s son, Pen Browning. Under Rodin’s instruction, the boy sculpted a small bronze Apollo next to a nymph. It so impressed his father that Browning took Rodin to dinner to thank him. “Like Rembrandt, he makes misery live, and finds beauty and poetry even in age-bowed backs,” he said of Rodin.

  Teaching came naturally to Rodin, whose childhood dream was to become an orator. While at boarding school in Beauvais, he sometimes practiced speaking in front of an empty classroom. One day some of the other boys caught him between classes, sitting in the teacher’s chair, lecturing and gesturing to no one. The boys watched from the doorway until their snickering startled Rodin back to reality.

  Now that the international demand for Rodin’s teaching had grown so high, he found himself in a position to open his own school. In the fall of 1899, he and two former assistants, Antoine Bourdelle and Jules Desbois, established the Institut Rodin on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. This time every seat in the classroom was filled, with thirty students signing up as soon as it opened enrollment.

  “Once you had seen him, once you had talked to him, you wanted to go to work right away,” said one student of Rodin. Kunst und Künstler magazine soon speculated that the Institut Rodin could pose a serious threat to the Grande École. Nothing could have pleased Rodin more. He had never forgiven the academy for shutting him out and now he had a chance to turn young minds against its rigid traditions.

  Rodin’s wasn’t the only new institution challenging the Grande École’s long-standing sovereignty over art education in Paris. Other artist-led programs, like the Julian and Colarossi academies, were launched as alternatives as well—and they, too, opened their doors more widely to women and foreign students. Among those who enrolled in the Institut Rodin’s first class was the American artist Sarah Whitney, the Scottish artist Ottilie McLaren and the German sculptor Clara Westhoff.

  HAILING FROM THE northern town of Bremen, Westhoff was awkwardly tall, with a heavy jaw and dark eyes. She had features as still and shadowy as a woodland, and kept nearly as quiet. At seventeen, she went to study sculpture in Munich, where she met the older painter Fritz Mackensen. When he told her about a reclusive artist colony he had founded in the village of Worpswede, near her hometown, she followed him there. The introverted sculptor felt at ease amid the majestic moors and fellow misfit artists for a while. But by the time she turned twenty-one, she knew she was too ambitious to stay in the tiny colony forever.

  When Westhoff heard that the great sculptor Rodin had opened his own academy in Paris, she packed her bags at once. In the winter of 1899, she hiked up five flights of stairs to her tiny hotel room in Montparnasse. At that time most of the city’s artists still lived in Montmartre, a rustic, hilly territory only incorporated into modern Paris thirty years earlier. Bohemians had colonized it for its cheap rents and cheap thrills, like the cabaret Le Chat Noir, and Le Moulin Rouge, with its famous windmill façade that mimicked the actual windmills of Montmartre. But tourists soon began to crowd these theaters of “authentic” Parisiana and landlords cashed in. Suddenly they demanded their rents be paid on time—and not on credit, on canvas or in verse. The gentrification of Montmartre set in motion a great southward migration toward Montparnasse. The year before Westhoff arrived, the Dôme opened to join La Closerie des Lilas as the first of many cafés that would soon serve the throngs of loafing “Montparnos” on their way.

  Westhoff’s best friend from Germany, the painter Paula Becker, moved into the room next door a few months later. The night she arrived, they stayed up talking until dawn. They had become friends the previous year in Worpswede, when Becker noticed Westhoff’s tender handling of a bust. She thought it suggested that the sculptor was an equally gentle person and, before long, they were braiding lilies into each other’s hair by day and dancing waltzes after dinner. They were in many ways complementary opposites: Becker was a petite copper-blonde with huge brown eyes that consumed everything in sight. Westhoff was downcast and reserved. When Westhoff’s shyness overcame her in social settings, Becker’s enthusiasm bubbled over for two.

  Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff in Worpswede, circa 1899.

  In Paris, they found new common ground as “women artists” in a city where no one cared about German art in the slightest. They explored the city together, scouting out shops that sold cheap barley coffee and the pastries they liked. They attended the salons and discovered the leading French artists, like Monet and Cézanne. The latter was such a revelation to Becker that Westhoff once watched her friend spin around in circles at a gallery showing the artist’s work. She had apparently discovered in his flatly painted canvases an affirmation of the work she had been making, and which she had not found among the Worpswede naturalists.

  Paris did not quite electrify Westhoff the same way it did her friend. While Becker was exhilarated by the city’s frenetic energy and cosmopolitan fashions, Westhoff’s only interest was working and making an impression on Rodin, a pursuit she found increasingly frustrating. A pleasant first exchange at his studio had set her hopes high. “He was very sweet to me, and showed me all kinds of things he was working on at the moment,” she told her parents. “Unfortunately I won’t be able to work alongside the men, for a thousand reasons which he explained to me.” But she still believed then that her work would transcend the superficial division, and “then I’ll ask him sometime to look at my work in my studio.”

  Westhoff found Rodin to be a rousing lecturer. His lessons were straightforward and he had a knack for simplifying complex ideas into pithy, digestible principles. “Smaller men try to make a mystery of their work and pretend there is nothing in it that can be taught, but there’s a very great deal that can be taught if there is someone who
has the power to teach,” said his student Ottilie McLaren. But Westhoff wanted more than Rodin’s example. She wanted him to look at her work and critique it individually. Yet he came to her studio only once or twice a month. Eventually, he even began sending assistants in his place.

  Rodin was busy then raising funds to meet the deadline to participate in the 1900 World’s Fair. The city had not invited him to officially show in the event, but would allow him to display his work on municipal land so long as he provided his own pavilion.

  Up to that point, the closest Rodin had come to exhibiting in the World’s Fair was in sculpting the details on works shown by other artists. Even though the pavilion would cost him eighty thousand francs, it was an opportunity he could not pass up. The population of Paris then was not quite three million; during the World’s Fair, the city would host fifty million people. Rodin would be the only artist there with a pavilion all his own.

  He asked the city to use the Place de l’Alma, a triangular patch of land at the well-trafficked intersection of Cour-la-Reine and Avenue Montaigne. The city council was divided in its opinion on Rodin and did not immediately approve the request. It took a sympathetic politician who moonlighted as a poet to nudge the proposal through. The sculptor knew how lucky he was: “If Paris had been Italy in the time of the Borgias I should have been poisoned,” he said.

  Determined not to squander his good fortune, Rodin drained his savings and borrowed money from three bankers to build a six-sided, Louis XVI–style pavilion with a steel frame and stucco walls. The leaves of the trees on the site tinted the light streaming through the tall, arched windows, giving the pavilion the lush, fertile feel of a greenhouse. For Rodin, sculpture was meant to be seen outdoors, where lighting was always at its best.

  The project consumed all of the artist’s time and, in April, just a few months after opening his academy, he closed it for good. Disappointed, Westhoff packed her things to return to Germany. But she could not leave before witnessing the extravaganza the World’s Fair was about to unleash on the city. She and Becker had been peeking through the construction fences for months as workers built walls for the new exhibition halls. The city had spent four years preparing to hold court before the entire world and prove that Paris was queen of the Belle Époque, ready to reign well into the twentieth century.