This statue had been ordered by the Société des Gens de Lettres, and was intended for one of the public squares of Paris. After Victor Hugo, Balzac. After the giant of modern poetry, the giant of the novel. What a redoutable honor, but also what a homage to the talent of the great sculptor! What joy for artists in the association of these two names, Balzac and Rodin! On the other hand, how many adversaries rejoiced in the hope of seeing Rodin come to grief with this task, fraught not less with peril than with glory! He did not conceal from himself that the statue of Balzac would be a severe problem to solve. We possess no authentic bust of the creator of the "Comédie Humaine," not even a death-mask giving the exact measure of the cranial bones and hence the actual planes. We know through his contemporaries that the author was fat and short. Fat and short--that is far from facilitating the composition of a work of decorative art. But, more precious than mediocre portraits, there is a famous page about him by Lamartine, another great genius. "Balzac," he says, "was the figure of an element ... stout, thick-set, square at the base and at the shoulders, ample, much as Mirabeau was; but not heavy in any way; he had so much soul that it carried _him_ lightly." [Illustration: STATUE OF BALZAC.] It was this essence that he set out to render. A frank artist takes no liberties with reality. It alone gives him force; the "majesty of the true" is alone durable. Nature, which dowered Balzac with one of the most prodigious intellects known to us, dowered him at the same time, to support this intellect, with the physical breadth of a colossus. To have altered anything that went to make up the harmony of the structure would have been to commit a grave error; it would have been to denaturalize the divine work. On the other hand, above this mass of flesh it was necessary to make that marvelous spirit hover, that sparkling spirit, that myriad-faceted spirit of the greatest of novelists. Rodin knows by experience that nature repeats herself. Has not a humorist said: "It is useless to make a bust of you; it exists already. You have only to look for it in the museums"?