The family of Victor Hugo did not like Rodin's portrait of the master. When the poet died (1885), it was Dalou whom they called to execute a death-mask of the features of the great poet. Filled with ambition and eager for official glory, Dalou had the weakness to accept, forgetting what he owed to Rodin, not even informing him, in fact. Deeply hurt, the latter withdrew his affection for his old friend. My father, saddened by this occurrence, which destroyed so rare and noble a friendship, brought the two friends together at his table in the hope of reconciling them; but nothing could melt the wall of ice that had fallen between these dissevered hearts. Ten years afterward a magnificent compensation was offered to Rodin. From him was ordered the monument of the poet for the Panthéon. He represented him nude, under the folds of a vast cloak, and seated on a rock, as if by the seashore, with his wonderful head bowed in an attitude of meditation, just as Rodin had often contemplated it in priceless hours. This manner of representing a great man, quite simply revived from the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, shocked to the last degree the administrative staff of the department of fine arts. Why this nude personage, instead of a quite respectable Victor Hugo in the frock-coat of an academician? Why not one of those statues that peacefully occupy some corner of a public square without attracting any one's attention, one of those statues that are not made to be looked at? As for this poet, who resembled a Homer, a hero or a demigod, this grand body, outrageously beautiful and simple, is it not scandalous in the midst of the conformity of bourgeois civilization, enslaved by the ugliness of fashion, whose perverted taste can no longer recognize the beauty of the nude? The painter David used to say of his epoch, in which, however, the mode of dress was less displeasing than it is to-day, "What misery to be obliged to spend one's life in fashioning coats and shoes!" Rodin, like David, and like Phidias, preferred the trade of the sculptor to that of the tailor. Such an uproar arose that he had to withdraw the model of his monument and promise another. But everything comes with time, even the best: the fortunes of politics brought to the ministry of fine arts an intelligent and cultivated director, the dramatic critic Gustave Larroumet. Delighted with Rodin's scheme, the magnificent symbolization of French poetry, he confirmed the order for the audacious monument, no longer for the Panthéon, but for the Luxembourg Gardens; and, not satisfied with this reparation, charged the master with the additional execution of another monument destined for the Panthéon. One can imagine the anger in certain circles--two orders on the same subject to the same sculptor! What an aberration! What madness! But the decision was made and well made.