As for the Norman, like his country he overflows with an abundance of life from which he derives a passionate need for the pleasures of sense. Far from stifling in him the love of the beautiful, this appetite for triumphant realities engenders, on the contrary, an exaltation of the senses that leads to the most exquisite taste in the production of art. Compounded of sensuality and mysticism, the twin characteristics of these rich spirits, very like those of Belgium, to whom, by virtue of ancient migrations, they are closely allied, the artists of Normandy necessarily respond to the manifold requirements of their temperament. We know with what a profusion of monuments, robust and imposing in structure and miraculously clothed in the most delicate lacework of stone, the Gothic architects of Normandy have covered not only the soil of their province, but also, beyond the sea, that of the Two Sicilies, strewn even to this day with beautiful cloisters and sumptuous churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which the Norman Conquest carried there. The child of Normandy and Lorraine was born in Paris, November 14, 1840. His father was a simple employee. He dwelt in one of the oldest and most curious quarters of the great city, the Quartier Saint-Victor in the fifth _arrondissement_. Rodin saw the light in the rue de l'Arbalète. It is a little, hilly street, quite provincial in its aspect and its quietness, that winds among the rows of old houses, some low, as if crouched down, others narrow and high, as if they wished to look over their shoulders at what passes below, very like a crowd of living people. Its name, the rue de l'Arbalète, is full of suggestion of the Middle Ages, like that of the rue des Patriarches, in which it comes to an end, and that of the rue des Lyonnais and the rue de l'Epée-de-Bois, which are its neighbors. It crosses the famous rue Mouffetard near the little church of St. Médard on the last slopes of the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, which has been, since the thirteenth century, the seat of the university and the schools; below is the plain of the Gobelins, where once the river Bièvre ran exposed. Even to the present day this corner of the city has not suffered too much from the destructive changes of modernity. At the time of the childhood of Rodin it was still virtually untouched. Crowded, picturesque, and in certain parts dirty and squalid, like an Oriental city, with its little interlacing streets, its countless shops, its swarms of people given over to a thousand familiar trades carried on in public,--open-air kitchens, fruit-stands, grocery shops, clothing shops, and shops of ironmongers, coal-venders, and, wine-sellers,--it is an almost perfect fragment, a human fragment, of the old Gothic Paris.