He set out to find a man who resembled Balzac, going all the way to Touraine, the writer's native province, a hundred times depicted by him in his books. The family of Balzac was originally from Languedoc, but that made no difference; the intuition of a great artist is always rewarded. Rodin found at Tours the model he desired; he was a young countryman, a carter, who resembled his hero to an almost miraculous degree. Of him he made a very animated bust, in which one sees the full face, the nose, concave and large at the end, but voluptuous and full of spirit, the rounded chin, the vast shoulders of the master of the "Comédie Humaine." There was lacking, however, the flame of thought that spiritualized and rendered buoyant this mass of human substance. Rodin modified the expression, illuminating the physiognomy with delicacy and frank gaiety. It is Balzac at twenty-five, a peasant Balzac, breathing at every pore youth, self-confidence, and the love of life. Not yet is it the man tormented by fate, the tragic visionary of the "Comédie Humaine," the slave of his work who in twenty years wrote fifty novels, staged a thousand characters, and gave life to an entire society. It is not the man who has suffered, thought, meditated, with all the power of one of the most extraordinary organisms known to us; it has not the appearance of a phenomenon. After this Rodin skilfully altered these features; he gave them the scars of the interior effort, he made them soft and hollowed them, he made them old and grave. In a few weeks he did the work that nature had taken years to accomplish. He finished by creating that Titan's mask which we know, that head as round as a bullet and, like a bullet, terrible in its concentrated force. Later he augmented this; that is to say, he doubled its proportions: and this head, almost frightening in its expression, recalls the masks which the Greek tragedians wore when they played in the open air. Finally he modeled the body of the colossus, making it entirely nude, with arms crossed, braced against the earth with the tension of the whole will, evoking the idea of some prodigious birth. Then he draped this heavy body in the monk's robe in which the writer used to envelope himself for work and the straight folds of which enwrapped him like the sheath of a mummy, offering to the sight nothing but the tumultuous head--the head ravaged by intelligence and savage energy. Rodin felt almost frightened by his own work. He kept it a long time before turning it over to the cast-makers. He had worked it out in his atelier, but it was destined for the open air. How would it appear in broad daylight?