The sculptor of "The Burghers of Calais" was then barely fifty. He was far from possessing the immense fame that is his to-day, but artists already regarded him as a master. Of medium height, robust, with large shoulders and heavy limbs, placid and deliberate in appearance, never gesticulating, he himself resembled a block of stone; but above this heavy base his countenance, with its broadly designed features and its gray-blue eyes, expressed an extraordinarily keen intelligence and finesse. Despite my youth I was struck by this physiognomy, so singular and so penetrating, and also by the remarkable shyness that made the sculptor blush whenever he was addressed. Since then innumerable portraits have familiarized people with these features, which with age have settled into an expression of authority and firm will; his strange timidity has disappeared with time, with the consciousness of his strength, with his having become accustomed to glory. Moreover, Rodin has become a ready talker. Of old he listened intently, but always held his peace; at most a few words, spoken in a soft, clear voice, escaped from the waves of his long beard. He would at once relapse into silence, while with a slow movement giving his beard an instinctive caress with his large, square, irresistible hand, the true hand of a builder. But when he raised his eyelids, almost always lowered, the transparent eye, that limpid gray-blue eye, betrayed a perspicacity that was almost malicious, almost cunning: one felt that he penetrated through the forms of people to their very souls; and this he fixed so skilfully in the clay of his busts that his models were not always pleased with it. Many of Rodin's portraits have been refused by sitters offended by their pitiless realism. [Illustration: STATUE OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE.] Sometimes my father kept Rodin and Jules Dalou to dinner. The two sculptors were devoted to each other. They were comrades from of old who had traveled together the hard road of beginners; since their student days at the Petite Ecole they had many times reëncountered each other in the same workshops, where they had received the same contemptuous wages for their long days of labor. They felt a profound esteem for each other's talent, different as these talents were, altogether opposed, in fact, as were their natures; and it was a fine, a lovely thing to see them bring forward each other's respective merits. Alas! I shall have to tell later how an artistic rivalry came one day to destroy this noble friendship.