Rodin’s busts are strikingly _ressemblant_--not always flattering to the subject, but remarkable revelations of the character of the individuals themselves. His busts of Victor Hugo and Henri Rochefort and Jean Paul Laurens are especially fine. “In making a portrait, for example,” Rodin says, “it requires several _séances_ for me to get into the spirit of my model. I am seeking always the distinguishing trait that makes this man or woman an individual different from the rest of his kind. When I discover this _trait marquant_ I dwell upon it, I insist on it--I caricature it, if you like--until my bust has likeness; then I know _that I know_ my model.” The sculptor has been at work for fifteen years on the famous “Porte de l’Enfer” (“Door of Hades”), ordered by the Museum of Decorative Art in Paris. Of this stupendous undertaking, as yet incomplete, only the most inadequate idea can be given. The portal measures six mètres in height; the panels and borders are filled with countless figures in _bas_ and high relief. Above the doors is a nude male figure in a sitting posture, elbows on the knees, head sunk on the hands. This is _Dante_, dreamer, meditator, before whose eyes passes the vision of the condemned. The groups, couples, and single figures represent everything that a fertile talent can conceive of dread and grief; there are visible [Illustration: LE JARDIN DES OLIVIERS DE L’HOMME DE GÉNIE] Greed, Lust, Crime, Despair--in short, all the worst of the World, the Flesh, and the Triumphant Fiend. At the lower corners are masks of Pain, and around and about them Satyrs, Centaurs, Nymphs male and female, human forms of all ages and nations, run their terrible race. These remarkably modelled figures are entwined, interlaced, leaning the one on the other, seeking to escape, pursuing, haunting, and fleeing, repelling, clasping in eternal desire, eternal horror, eternal despair. Here are Paola and Francesca in their own forms, and their symbols in many another; here, even, are tiny bodies of infants, “who seek with sightless eyes to penetrate limbo and the shades.” No one but Rodin since the days of the Ghibellines could have ventured upon this subject, and of the tremendous result there has as yet been one general verdict of praise. It is Rodin’s _chef-d’œuvre_. The doors are to be cast in bronze, and are all but in the hands of the casters.