Standing before the head of “L’Homme au Nez Cassé” (curiously enough the milestone of his first defeat, refused by the Salon in 1864), his masterpieces all around him, in the mellow light of the autumn sun falling on exquisite marble or dark bronze, Rodin said: “It is good to be alive. I find existence marvellous, glorious. These effigies of human pain” (and he indicated a bronze representing an emaciated poet dying on the knees of the Muse) “no longer make me suffer as they used. I am happy. To me nature is so beautiful, the truths of humanity are so thrilling, that I have grown to adore life and the world. _Je trouve que la vie est tellement belle!_” His face was fairly luminous. This apotheosis of _bien-être_ that the sculptor has reached in late middle age is perhaps Nature’s gift, her reward to him who, in spite of discouragement and the world’s scorn, has for forty years been her faithful, adoring disciple. France is true to her traditions in her treatment of her celebrated men. She has slaughtered a king, dethroned an emperor, sold a deliverer (Jeanne d’Arc), and to her immortal artists offers as a stirrup-cup at starting such draughts of bitterness that if the very divinity within them did not preserve them for posterity’s good, who can tell whether Carpeaux, Delacroix, Manet, Rude, Berlioz, Garnier, Baryé, Puvis de Chavannes, and Rodin would not have fallen by the way?--and all the names are not here! Prejudice and schools in every country and age have their scores to level. (Shades of Shelley, Keats, Chatterton, will bid England hold her peace.) Puvis de Chavannes (Rodin’s mighty brother amongst France’s great artists) stretched toward his laurels in old age a hand that stiffened in [Illustration: INTERIEUR D’ATELIER] death before it could hold the wreaths of fame. One and all of the illustrious ones were misapprehended; and Auguste Rodin, when he made his first appeal to public judgment, stepped into this rank, and awakened “the idiot risibles of a gaping stupidity,” instead of the grave appreciation that was his due. Rodin is of the people, and was born in Paris in 1840. His parents were poor, and during the long years--apparently fruitless, and heaping disappointment on disappointment--urged him to take to a trade which would bring him immediate results. “I have no history,” he says; “my life is simply the story of constant struggle and unchanged poverty. I was poor, but I was strong; and in the moments when I was not bitterly discouraged I felt a certain stimulus in setting myself against the world. Over by the École de Médecine, in Paris, is the little school where I went as a boy, and where I first took simple lessons in drawing.”