The Age of Maturity by Pamela Hodgson

(This story originally appeared in BLOOD MUSE, edited by Esther M. Friesner and Martin H. Greenberg, published by Donald I. Fine, Inc. There is much in this story that is historically accurate. The story is copyright 1995 by Pamela Hodgson. All rights reserved.)

Of the dream which was my life, this is the nightmare.

--Camille Claudel

Most of all I miss the smells of the atelier, the wet, earthy aroma of the clay, the dusty tang of the plaster . . . that and the click click click of the chisel against marble, its repercussion jangling the flesh of my hand with each mottled gray chip that comes away to reveal the figure within. Yes, I have asked again, just as you suggested, and again they have told me that I will not be permitted to work, even as therapy. When a scrap of dirty paper comes into my hands, I find myself rolling it between my fingers like a bullet of damp clay, molding it with my fingers into whatever shape feels right.

Then they take it away from me, and sit me down once again between the flat-featured old woman who babbles into the sleeve of her robe about heroes of the Great War and the sour-smelling one with the knifelike cheekbones who sits passively, blank-faced, until another fit overtakes her and foam spews from her mouth like an angry ocean battering against the jagged rocks of her face. I am told she is here because she lost a child. I have lost that too, but so much more.

Three children, actually, I will confess to you, because as a woman you might understand. Two are away in the care of the nuns, thanks to the pockets (generosity would be the wrong word) of their father Auguste Rodin. The third was never born. I was very young then, and he had not yet agreed to marry me. He never did marry me, despite the promises he made--always he returned to the old slattern Rose and her useless son to who he never gave his name. And I ended up here, imprisoned amongst the madwomen, sequestered from the world lest it learn the bloody truth.

And so I set it down here for you and perhaps your readers, in hope that you will trust my word and I will be remembered. I remain amazed that you troubled to find me, and befriend me through your letters. Your motive is of course only to eulogize the maitre, but your kind letters and attention warm me nonetheless. I am moved to trust you. Of course, what have I to lose?

I was only eighteen when I met Auguste Rodin, in 1882, and he became my tutor because I showed promise as a sculptress. I was taken with the passion of his work; he poured his very soul into the figures, and I wanted to be just like him. I wanted my figures to live and breathe and speak, just as clearly as his Porte d'Infer, always in progress, affords a peek into the lurid fantasies only the boldest of us dare to enact. Just as clearly as his Nez Casse reeks of working-class nobility under a neoclassical headdress, his stare scorning the Salon that scorned Rodin.

Later, I met the man who modeled for that bust, and for others, He was a coal hauler when Rodin first offered him a few francs to pose; by the time Rodin used him to portray the body of his Saint Jean-Baptiste prechant, the poor fellow was as pale and ragged as the Baptist living in the wild. Later, he stood for one of the damned on the Porte d'Infer, and one of the Bourgeois de Calais. By the time of that last, he was thin and haggard, used up. Rodin ended up returning the figure to the clay pot, and starting with a new model. The man with the bent nose died cold, drunk and penniless not long after.

He was hardly the first or last to suffer such an end in Paris in the latter half of the century. You English have been so mercifully free of revolution. Do you know enough to be grateful?

The young woman who sleeps in the blood-scented cot next to mine has come to ask for my hairbrush. I give it to her. She is as sane as I; her husband committed her owing to the malaise and discomfort she experiences with the cycles of the moon. Being a hard-handed country woman of little education, she believed herself insane. Her husband feared she would turn to animal with the full moon, and must be put away to keep their children from harm. Her eyes still widen with fear when the full white circle peeps through the tiny barred window at the top of our wall. I have explained to her about woman's time, but still she inspects her fingers and gropes at her face for the telltale signs of change. I wish that I could make a bust of her, all broad marble-smooth cheeks and frightened eyes, mouth parted slightly as she runs a trembling finger over the serrated edges of her teeth . . . .

If only she knew.

I had seen Rose Beuret, the mistress who was closest to wife to Rodin. She helped at Rodin's atelier like a servant when I first met him, carefully draping wet cloths over the clay, fetching him tools, sweeping up around him. At first I could not understand what he saw in her tiny cowering figure, her illiterate talk and country accent--she looked like a servant. Once her breasts had been large and full--he had sculpted her figure a dozen years earlier, no doubt pinching her nipple like a pellet of clay and then caressing the clay as if it were a woman--but now, now with the weight of age and childbearing they sagged like homespun sacks. Too, the light had gone out from her eyes--had it been there in the first; I can only judge by the heads she modeled for, and I could not know then if the light and energy came from her or from the maitre's hand.

It seemed no surprise when he took me to his bed. He could never love any woman as much as his work, I knew, but he professed to love me nearly that much. I buried myself in his long reddish beard, I stroked and touched his middle-aged body as if it were my own creation, molding it to a form which pleased me. Some days he was pliable, like clay; some he was cold and solid as bronze; some he was fragile as a plaster cast from life. When I tired of his humeur changeante and left for England, he implored in letters that I must return, that he needed me badly.

It was true. His work suffered in that year. He produced nothing of note except a series of excuses for the delays with his commissions.

Why did I leave him, you ask? Because he drained me, he tired me, he took everything from me. I do not mean this figuratively. This is not why my brother had me incarcerated all these years later in this ward full of filthy human stench--it was rather that a sister who does not feel constrained by convention is an embarrassment to a rapidly rising diplomat--but had he known my story then, my fate would have been sealted much sooner. The seal is no less sturdy. My life might as well be frozen in bronze.

Now you think me mad as well. You think you have wasted the minutes you have invested so far in this narrative, that your sympathy over the last several weeks has been ill-spent. But please, spare me a moment more of your time, no more, and let me tell you how I have come to know the truth. Then you may judge.

Perhaps you have heard rumors of Rodin and Victor Hugo in 1884. The great poet had been disappointed in previous busts of himself, and so would not sit for Rodin. Instead, he invited Rodin into his home to observe him, to take meals, and do his moulage out of the great man's sight. Hugo's home at the time flowed with the crackle of conversation; he hosted dozens of artists and poets every day. But his mistress and hostess Juliette Drouet grew frail with a cancer that chewed away at her intestines. The visitors drifted away, leaving Hugo to his place at Juliette's bedside. The great man would not leave her. And yet, Rodin came every day to observe. He came into the sick room and sat amidst the stale odor of sweat-soaked linens and the subtle rot of Juliette's failing body. He peered nearsightedly as Hugo leaned close to Juliette to hear her faltering voice, so that one might think he was also listening, and then surreptitiously sketched the poet's profile, his expressions, on a bit of used tissue, images to sculpt from later. It is said that he did his best work on the Hugo bust the day he watched the poet at Juliette's deathbed.

By that time Rodin maintained a household with me in the Boulevard d'Italie and we shared studio space there and at the Depot des Marbres. That day, the day Juliette died, I ran my fingers over the pocked mass of clay that was the Hugo bust. A chill ran through me, as if the wings of the angel of death had brushed lightly against my spine. For a moment too short to measure, I saw Juliette dying through Victor Hugo's eyes, and I felt his sorrow as if a part of myself had been cut away and replaced with an aching, black pit of emptiness. In the space of a breath the sensation had passed, but it had left its mark in my recollection. I could never look upon the Hugo sculpture again.

I was horrified at that first transcendent moment. But I came to envy it. That Auguste Rodin could transfigure the very clay into a glimpse inside the soul of a man--what greater aspiration is there for an artist? What greater desire?

The following morning I skulked around his workplace at the Depot des Marbres looking for opportunity to touch his works in progress when he wasn't looking. He was engrossed in one of the figures of the Bourgeois de Calais, the one with tearful head in hands, and I longed to finger it and see what it brought me. Of course he was not modeling from life--the leading citizens of Calais had offered their lives in return for the safety of their city five hundred years earlier--but it is a powerful work, and I wondered from whence it derived its soul. From whence he derived it.

After a while Rose came, wiping her hands on a threadbare skirt while she chattered at him about household expenses, and how long it had been since he had been to their home. She smelled of flour and grease. He nodded absently at her through most of the chatter, not turning away from the clay his fingers pummelled. When she burst into tears and flung herself at him he spun away from his work as if noticing her for the first time. He collected her into his arms and held her, leaving clay-colored handprints on the back of her blouse. When she looked up at him again, I could see in the silhouette of her brow that she had indeed once been beautiful. He muttered comforting sounds into her hair as he guided her out of the studio and across the marble block-filled courtyard to the street. She glared at me with such fervor as they passed that had he not been there, I think she would have spat in my eye.

He strode back in but did not return to the tearful man of Calais as I had thought he would, but rather seized a fresh hunk of clay and began anew, forming a small, crumpled woman in his hands. Satisfied, he set the tiny maquette aside, and went back to the bourgeois. I too returned to my own atelier and my own work. In the face of a woman, I tried to evoke Rose, her bitterness toward me (and my own toward the hag). What came forth instead was the rumpled brow of confusion and the slack jaw of ignorance.

I forgot about the small female figure until I saw it again, larger, in plaster, waiting outside the Depot des Marbres to be taken to the foundry and cast in bronze. The Fallen Caryatid, you will know it as; he added a base below and stone above, as if the weight of the building it held had crushed the life out of it. I touched the plaster and waited; I felt the energy pour out of me as if an artery had been sliced cleanly and its contents pumped out into the work in front of me. But all of it was not Rose . . . I saw in my mind as well the image of Eugenie Robert, the praticienne who made the plaster from Rodin's clay model, and knew her exhaustion at the end of a long day, felt the quiver of her empty growling stomach and the hopeless droop of her shoulders. I shook plaster dust off my hand as I stepped away. A tear ran unbidden down my face. I had a few francs in my purse; I dropped them into the pocket of Eugenie's smock hanging on the back of the door.

In fact the sense of Rose Beuret in that work was feeble, weak. I wondered if perhaps he had had his fill of her, and there was nothing left. My heart leapt inside me at that thought; if he was through with Rose, and only maintained a seldom-visited house with her out of aging loyalty, then perhaps he would commit himself to me at last.

We wrote a letter together--he was never so good with words as he was with his hands; I frequently found for him the phrases he was seeking, as I knew him intimately enoough to know what he meant to say even when he said nothing--in which he promised to marry me. We even planned my wedding photo. Some say the letter was written by me, but anyone who knows his hand can tell that it is his pen that wrote it. And he truly did love me, at least at that moment.

He had finished Le Baiser. My brother called it vulgar and unchaste, the intertwined marble nudes, their open lips joining. But to me, it spoke of summer afternoons, long walks in the Bois de Boulogne with a handful of jonquils tucked in the band of my hat, the heat of a hand pressed possessively against the small of my back. It spoke of summer evenings, the marble smoothness of flesh against flesh, the coolness of the evening breeze against passion-soaked skin. Of course it spoke to me . . . it was his work, but it came from me.

I knew this for certain--and knew what it was that drew him to me--as he finished the Bourgeois de Calais. I worked closely with him on the six life-sized figures as the pressure to complete a project so long in the making, one for which he had collected the bulk of the payment years earlier, became intense. He always believed hands were the most expressive of parts. Of his own it was certainly true. Even in conversation, the flex and dance of his hands in the air spoke with more fervor and truth than this thin, soft voice. He seldom permitted anyone to work upon the hands of one of his sculptures, but he always let me.

He gave me the hands of Jean d'Aire, the holder of the key amongst the doomed men of Calais, to complete. Jean's iron-straight back and defiant scowl had been set by the master's hand. It was left to me to determine whether he would dangle the giant city key or clutch it, hold it with fondness or with fear.

When I touched the hardening clay as Rodin had left it, I braced myself for the rush of emotion, the snatches of catharsis that I had come to expect, and even ignore, from his work. But this time, there was none. I felt again, thinking perhaps I had become jaded or protective of myself, oblivious to what was there to be experienced. I ran my open hands over the folds of the cloak, traced the downward curve of the mouth, even the rope that hung in grim promise around the neck. I felt only the pinprick bumps in the cool surface tingling my fingertips. I pressed my cheek against the man's back, held the figure like a lover. Still I felt no more than the lines of its shape.

"It's not finished," he said from behind me. Pink light from the setting sun outside the window glinted off his pince-nez, clashing with the graying orange of his beard and hair. He wound his pale fingers around my forearms and lifted me up and away from the figure with the gentle force one uses on a child. "You have work of your own. Let me touch this one up some more." A cloud of dust from his smock tickled my nostrils as he slid between me and the Jean d'Aire.

"You gave me the hands! I want to do the hands!" I protested, my voice rising and breaking like a boy's despite my best efforts at controlling it.

"You can do the hands," he said distractedly. He did not turn to acknowledge me. He had already taken his modeling tool to the figure's left shoulder. "Not now."

I shook the dust from my apron, blinked it from my eyes. I stretched my fingers toward the sleeve of his smock, but he followed the curve he was shaping just out of my reach.

I went back to my own studio and sunk my hands deep into a bust of Rodin. I closed my eyes tight, not wanting to look upon the man, but let the fabric of his being flow from me into the mass of wet clay at the ends of my arms. The clay fought me, becoming stiff and reticent no matter how much I wet it with water and spit. At last, I let it go. I would take it up again another day.

He asked me back to help with Jean d'Aire exactly a week after. I remember, because I had heard from a local gossip that he had gone with Rose to Meudon, and I counted the days in which we were apart, wondering at what number I must consider him lost to me.

Not lost. He may have spent time with Rose, but his soul was with me. I knew that when I entered the atelier and looked upon the figure of Jean d'Aire. He had the same stern features and strong stance, but his eyes radiated as much pain as passion. He stood tall, but one could see the tension as his shoulders fought off a defeated slump.

I knew in him my own fight to deny the truth of my defeat.

It was more than I wanted to know. I started to leave then, to go away, to save what strength I had in me for my own work, not for this man's, nor for a losing battle to win his love. I edged backward toward the street door, brushing clumsily past maquettes and half-finished bricks of marble, figures still partially trapped in stone. I was nearly outside, nearly free of him when he stopped me with a word. "Camille," he whispered into the silence cut only by the hammering of a woodpecker outside, "his hands." He splayed his own huge, calloused palms open toward me. "You must help me with his hands."

I gazed down to the place where the figure's arms ended in ugly clumps as if sadly deformed. I saw the useless defiance of a helpless cripple, and could not abandon something that was so . . . so much myself in such a piteous state. I thought to escape, to leave this monstrous thing that confronted me and run, run back to my own workspace and create something as unlike it as possible, to deny the truth by remaking it. But that was not possible. The only thing to do was give the whole story. To finish the hands.

I perfected them. I don't mean fine detail of cuticle and crosshatch line of palms. I perfected the shape, the posture of the hands so that they were not wretched and impotent, but rather grasped the key to Calais with strength and firmness of purpose. Even in defeat, these hands would not tremble or quake. These hands were noble. Powerful. Strong.

And when I returned to my own atelier, leaving behind the sweat-smell of the hard-working crowd of assistants, students, and acolytes as well as the crackle of activity and anticipation that surrounded everything the maitre did, there was nothing left in me but silence. I stroked the pile of clay on my worktable. I plied it, I poked and squeezed it, but it took on no more form than sand under a child's hand. I pounded at it, beat it, brutalized it. Before long I had lost control and pummelled the hunk of drying clay with my fists like a prisoner begging to be let free. I gasped and grunted with the effort, hammering the sides of my hands murderously into the shape. My voice rose from gasps of pain into the wet wail of an abandoned child.

And still, within, there was silence. There was nothing left of me. I was drained.

And so I left him again. I said nothing; I simply moved my home and my work to another addres, not too far removed from the one we had shared. I worked on The Conversation, a tiny group of gossips executed in green onyx, as unlike anything of the maitre's as I had ever done. And it lived! Yes, it had life, a soul of its own, more spirit and warmth than anything I had done in the ten or twelve years under Rodin's tutelage. At last, I felt free.

Still, I loved the man. He had taught me so much. For a long time I was bitter; he would write to me, or to my English friend Jessie, inquiring about my health. I would tear up the letters into tiny snowflakes, then set them in a pile and burn them. He would help my career by mentioning my name for a state commission, suggesting I be included in an exhibition. Whenever I learned it had come from him, had been a product of what he had siphoned from me rather than from the merit of my own work and my own soul, I rejected it, angry. No doubt I did myself much harm in those years--leaving many to be unsurprised when at last I was sent away--but what he had taken from em had left an empty space, a dark cavern inside me, as sore as if he had gored it out with a dull-edged modeling knife.

And at last that emptiness, like the vacuum nature abhors, sought to fill itself. After not leaving my home for perhaps as much as three months, I attended an exhibition of new works with my friend Mathias Morhardt. Rodin sent the marble Je Suis Belle. At first, from a distance, I saw nothing in this strange work depicting a man, upright, with a woman, compact and fetal, balanced on his head and chest. His usual vibrant contortions of the human form, certainly, but I could see no meaning in it. I felt icy satisfaction. I drew Mathias closer so that he too could see the nothingness of it and vindicate me.

We pressed past a bosomy auburn-haired woman whose potent perfume made me sneeze. She giggled and fluttered at her companion, loosing a cloud of powder form her face as she protested how much she adored Monet because he so captured her adored Nature. One could hear the capital N in her enunciation of it. I snorted to Mathias, who darted a quick look at the woman's companion, then drew me stiffly away. I resisted his tug on my arm and looked back. Next to the fussy woman, gazing deeply into the painting while his hand, as if with a separate mind, roved along the woman's arm and shoulder, was Rodin. His beard had grayed a touch more in the months since I had seen him, and his spiky military-style haircut had grown out a bit. I felt hellish heat in the pit of my stomach while icy tentacles danced along my spine.

There was nothing I could say to him, had I been able to summon breath to speak. After a moment frozen to the spot, I let Mathias lead me away. Within two steps, we were confronted with Rodin's statue, much as if we were caught in a house of mirrors, with no escape from some manifestation of the man.

It took me a moment to recognize the posture of the woman as yet another edition of the crumpled woman, the one he had sketched in clay in miniature the day Rose was in the atelier. I reached upward, letting my fingertips graze her shin, bracing myself for whatever might come in the hope that I could experience it without embarrassing myself in public.

There was nothing.

I circled like a predator and prodded gently with my finger, then stroked with my full hand, every side of the woman. And still she had no soul.

I felt the warmth of a body standing too close to my left elbow. When I turned I found myself face to face, almost chest to breast, with the maitre. Mathias sputtered behind me, but I relegatd him to the crowd noise and traffic--Rodin and I became the center, the only part that mattered, the part of the stone that is the figure, needing only the rest to be chipped away to free it. Rodin took my wrist in his rough hand and pressed my palm not to the woman, but to the male figure. Actually, he let go just a fraction of an inch before I made contact, letting the momentum take me the rest of the way.

I closed my eyes and viewed through the eyes of another. I saw the world only as fleeting souls needing to be captured and sealed in shapes of plaster, marble, bronze, that must be made solid and permanet to save them from their mortal fate. I felt the maitre's love for every one of them, his passion, but overall his need to seize the spirits of the living and make as many immortal as he could before they escaped into oblivion.

And last, I felt his defeat. I felt the ache of remorse at his knowing that in order to capture life he had drained away life, from me, from Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet, but most of all from Rose. He had taken her spirit, and had nothing left to give.

I broke loose from the cool touch of the marble, my hand trembling and brow damp. The tang of my own perspiration drifted around me; I closed my arms tight around my chest. "Do you see?" he whispered, his voice as soft and pleading as when he first took me to him. I did not answer.

* * * *

But I saw. And in desperation I attempted to do the impossible, those next several years. I tried to recreate genius such as his by myself stealing the souls of those around me to capture in clay and stone. I did not care about making them immortal, however; I cared only about myself, that I should be remembered for my work, for something more than my liaison with Rodin.

First there was Debussy, then there were others, so many others that I can barely name them. I took them to my bed, into my life. I loved them as best I could, then taunted them and stole from them, both their hearts (if they had offered them to me) and their spirits. But at the last, I lacked the soul of a maitre. I didn't care enough for my lovers, and so they could not give enough to me.

And of course there was my prudish brother, virgin into his middle thirties, busy building his career as a famous diplomat. To him, the elder sister who had taught him in childhood what it was to have passion for one's work had become simply an embarrassment, an aging whore passing as an artist, so he called me.

By that time there was nothing left in me that I could give him, that might rekindle our youthful love for one another and bring us back together. When he visited me, no doubt all he saw was my frantic, consuming passion to survive beyond this life, and the terror that coursed through me like electric jolts as I tried to enliven the clay and stone, and failed. Perhaps he felt something more than horror and pity; perhaps there was still an element of love that caused him to have me locked away from the work that I so adored, the work that was my life. Perhaps he thought to save me.

And now Rodin has died, and he will be remembered, Not just by journalists like you. Generations to come, years hence, will graze his plasters and his bronzes, and be seized with a momentary glimpse into a soul long dead. At least mine is one of those souls.

Looking back, I must say that I produced my finest work in 1894, the year our relationship ended. It is called The Age of Maturity. It portrays a man, Rodin, being led off into old age by a woman, not unlike Rose, while the figure of youth--myself--pines its loss. Or so the critics have described it. They miss the point. It is not about age overtaking youth, or a lover scorned. It is about Rodin breaking free.

Would that I had done the same.

All this humanity in Rodin's work isn't really human. These beings who twist and turn hysterically seem to be moved by a sort of electricity of death; the soul is absent.

--Odilon Redon, 1897