Of course at the time he did not appreciate its splendor. With the indifference of his age, he studied its architecture and its sculpture, which, for that matter, all his contemporaries, even the cultivated, despised from the depth of their ignorance. That was the time when art critics and professors of esthetics denied Gothic art without comprehending it, the Roman school being in the ascendant in the admiration of the public. Nevertheless, the jewel in stone did not fail to speak in the language of beauty and truth to this predestined young man. His sensibility registered its impressions, noted down those points of comparison which he was to find later in the depths of his memory and which were to enable him to judge and appreciate. Under the vault of the majestic nave he listened to the mass, he took part in the grand, sacred drama, whose phrases touched his imagination profoundly, sometimes exalting it to the point of mysticism and impregnating it with the nobility of the symbols and of the Catholic ritual tempered by eighteen centuries of usage. Rodin was placed in a boarding-school. He found the scholar's life dreary and dull; his comrades seemed to him noisy young barbarians, absorbed in brutal and too often vicious pastimes. Certain studies were repugnant to him, mathematics and _solfeggio_. Near-sighted, without being aware of it, he could not make out the figures and the notes the masters wrote on the blackboard; he understood nothing and was almost bored to death. This myopia was destined to have the most vital influence on his art. Because of his difficulty in perceiving total effects, his instinct has only rarely led him to the composition of monuments on a very large scale, in which the architectural construction is of nearly as great importance as the sculpture proper. The most considerable that we owe to him is that of "The Burghers of Calais"; and there is also "The Gate of Hell," which, almost inexplicably, remained incomplete even in the very hour when it was given over as finished. The great sculptor, at the time when he turned it over to the founders, perhaps unconsciously experienced a lapse of vision, an insurmountable fatigue of the eyes, over-strained by the prolonged effort to grasp the ensemble of the edifice and the harmony of the countless details of this superb composition. But if he has been turned aside, by his physical constitution, from monumental art, it has only served to concentrate him with all the more ardor upon the minute work of modeling, for which, by a sort of compensation, he is endowed with an eye whose penetration has had no equal since the time of the Renaissance.