Gutzon sailed on the _Bourgogne_ with plenty of hope and the proceeds of his art sales in Omaha and New York. He admitted that he felt proud of himself. He had been out of St. Mary’s seven years. In 1891 a description of him was included in a passport issued by the U. S. Embassy in Paris and signed by Whitelaw Reid. It gave his age as twenty-four years; stature, 5 feet, 8½ inches; forehead, broad; eyes, gray; nose, regular; mouth, medium; chin, round; hair, dark; complexion, dark; face, oval--and it is a matter of great puzzlement to one who knew Gutzon for forty years. It shows the picture of a somewhat thin, energetic young man of dark complexion, regular features, broad forehead and no great height. Yet, not until he had read this record did an old friend realize that Borglum’s complexion was anything save that contrived by weather and wind. Even more astoundingly came the revelation that Gutzon was less than six feet in height. He looked to be taller. Nobody seems to have found much about Gutzon’s art studies in Europe worth recording. He passed two years in Paris, studying at the Julien Académie, at the École des Beaux Arts and under individual masters. He exhibited in the Old Salon as a painter in 1891 and 1892. His picture called “Clouds” attracted some attention. In 1891, through a deliveryman’s mistake, a piece of bronze was taken to the New Salon. It was accepted by the New Salon, which made him a member of the society. The notice informing him of this unexpected honor was followed by a personal letter of congratulation written by the celebrated painter Puvis de Chavannes, who had succeeded Meissonier as president of the Salon. Borglum’s work of sculpture was called “Death of the Chief” (_Mort du Chef_) and represented a horse with lowered head beside the body of a dead Indian. A copy of the group was unveiled in Los Angeles in 1947. The great experience of Gutzon’s life in Paris was meeting and forming a friendship with Auguste Rodin. He said afterward that it wasn’t a new experience. “It was rather a feeling of coming home,” he said, and finding something he had dimly sensed in himself and was trying to express. Rodin at the time was having trouble with the Academicians and would follow a long road before being acclaimed the great master the world now recognizes. Gutzon’s attitude toward life was much the same. He was also committed to a long quarrel with that state of mind which accepts stereotyped standards and resists change or improvement. Gutzon wrote this about Rodin: I hold Rodin to be one of the great individuals of history. He was one of the rarest souls of whom we have any record during the last 3,000 years. He is passing and there will be nothing left to speak for this man, who stands with Phidias, Donatello, Rembrandt and Shakespeare, but a trail of broken fancies. The nineteenth century has made no adequate use of his incomparable gifts.