He had the opportunity of seeing his modeling corrected by Carpeaux. The great sculptor, in fact, taught at the Petite Ecole. Upon his return from Rome, he had asked for a modest post as an assistant master that would help to assure his equally modest existence; they had granted his request, but without seeking to give him anything more! His young pupils scarcely understood his high worth, the substantial and delicate grace of his talent, his voluptuous elegance, inherited from the eighteenth century and united with a certain nervous seductiveness that was altogether modern, a certain palpitating quality of the soul and of the flesh that had not been known before, manifesting itself through the ductility of his modeling. But instinctively they admired him; they marveled, among other things, at the precision and the rapidity of the corrections the master executed under their eyes. Later, when experience had come to him, Rodin greatly honored Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux; he was one of those for whom the appearance of the famous group "The Dance," in the parvis of the Opéra, was a veritable event. At that moment he discovered again in himself the influence of this beautiful spirit which had been slumbering in him since he left the Petite Ecole; then he became almost the disciple of Carpeaux. I know a figure of a bacchante of Rodin's, a marble that is almost unknown, the flesh of which is so supple and so light that one would say it was molded of wheat and honey and the work of the sculptor of "The Dance." There floats also in its countenance that spirituality, that expression as of a sort of angelic malice which Carpeaux seems to have borrowed occasionally from the figures of Leonardo da Vinci. [Illustration: MINERVA.] When the clocks of the Sorbonne quarter struck noon, Rodin left the Petite Ecole; he walked to the Louvre, eating, as he went, a roll and a cake of chocolate which was all he had for lunch. He sketched the antiques. From there he went on to the Galerie des Estampes at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they loaned out, without any too much good will, misplaced as that is with students, the albums of plates after Michelangelo and Raphael and the great illustrated work, "L'Histoire de Costume Romain." Because of this miserliness of theirs, he did not always obtain the volumes he wished for, which were reserved for habitués who were better known. This did not prevent him from becoming initiated into the science of draperies. He executed hundreds of sketches from memory, at last developing in himself the faculty of remembering forms. From the rue de Richelieu, always on foot, he would repair to the Gobelin manufactory. There each day, from five to eight o'clock, he followed the course in design. Placed before nature itself, before the nude, he absorbed more excellent principles. The teaching of the eighteenth century was practised there also, and his work became permanently impregnated by it.