At the age of fourteen he returned to Paris. His parents judged that the moment had come for him to choose a career. Observing his astonishing gifts, they decided to let him take up drawing, but, having small means, they were unable to provide him with special masters. They entered him at the School of Decorative Arts, another piece of good fortune. This school, called by abbreviation the Petite Ecole, in distinction from the great school, that of the Beaux-Arts, is situated in the old rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, close to the Faculté de Médecine and the Sorbonne. It was founded in 1765, under the name of the Free School of Design, by the painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier, a clever artist and student of styles in art no longer practised or little known, who had been well thought of by Madame de Pompadour, the favorite of Louis XV, the charming and virtually official minister of fine arts during the reign of that monarch. It was she who placed Bachelier in charge of the _ateliers de décoration_ at the Sèvres manufactory. In creating the Petite Ecole, the painter seemed to be following out, after the death of his gracious protectress, the impulse she had communicated to French art during her lifetime. [Illustration: LA PUCELLE.] Thus we see Rodin at the school of the Marquise de Pompadour, placed once more in a _milieu_ full of originality and life. He found himself there surrounded by a little world of beginners in every line, budding artists; almost everybody of his generation has passed through this course. They came there to learn to draw, paint, and model. In the evening the halls were filled with amateurs who, after their day's work was over, sought to acquire a certain artistic skill as tapestry-workers, ornament-makers, workers in iron, marble, etc. They were energetic, turbulent, poor. Rodin, like them, was energetic and poor, but silent, laborious, and pertinacious. He applied himself to the copying of models of all sorts, most frequently red chalks by Boucher and plaster casts of animals, plants, and flowers. The school had possessed these things since the eighteenth century and, like almost everything that was created in that bountiful epoch, they were very well done, composed after nature, their elegance full of warm truth; they were models in bold _ronde-bosse_. That is to say, they presented that quality of relief to which drawing, like sculpture, owes its rich oppositions of light and shadow. To those who copied them they communicated the science of relief, the fundamental basis of art, and the living suppleness of the best periods, which has almost entirely disappeared to-day. One day Rodin entered the modeling class. He worked there after the antique. He had his first experience of working in clay; it was a revelation, an enchantment. He fell in love with this _métier_, which seemed to him the most seductive of all; he became obsessed with the desire to mold this soft material himself, to search in it for the form of things.