All this is a profound mistake. Sculptured ornament springs naturally from architecture; it is the flowering of its fundamental elements. It is an inherent part of the whole, as the mass of flowers and foliage that crowns a tree is in a way the culminating point of the whole vegetable organism. Ornament demands the same qualities that the fundamental architectural structure demands, and fully as much talent and perhaps even more; because, as Rodin says, one sees in it more clearly, without distracting features, the form of genius. If it is not well done in itself, its function, which is rigorously subordinated to the whole, and consists in molding the contours of the structure by underlining and marking them off, is reversed. It is then only an excrescence, an arbitrary addition. Only mediocre artisans, when employed on a building or a jewel, use ornament capriciously, without proportioning and subordinating it to the mass; they weary and disgust the beholder. Rodin and his companions did not content themselves with copying, and more or less distorting, their Greek, Roman, and Renaissance models, which were repeated to satiety in all the workshops of the world, and done over and over again so many times, out of place and out of proportion, that they had lost all significance. Their employer possessed a beautiful, but neglected, garden, where a profusion of plants ran riot. Here were models in abundance. Here, in reproducing these, the young craftsmen refreshed their vocation; they copied their ornaments from nature; they studied foliage and flowers from life. To do new work, they had only to borrow from the vegetable world its inexhaustible combinations of beauty. Here Rodin, by his cleverness and rapidity, became without a peer among them all, and drew to himself the admiration of his fellow-workers. It was here that he met Constant Simon, his elder by many years, who was the first man to teach him to model in profile. It was one of the great epochs in his life. One may say that from that time the two great laws that have given his sculpture its power--the study of nature and the right method of modeling--passed into his blood, as it were. The secret that Simon imparted to him was like a philter that inflamed his soul with enthusiasm. He became intoxicated with the idea of seeing clearly and of holding his hand strictly accountable to what his eyes disclosed. And he possessed, too, both youth and an indefatigable vigor. He sketched everything he could, wherever he could. One saw him making sketches on the street, in the horse-market, jostled by the beasts, repulsed by men, yet indifferent to all difficulties in his enchantment in his discovered prize, at the Jardin des Plantes, where he passed hours before the cages and in the parks, studying the poses of the deer and the grace of the moving antelopes. [Illustration: RODIN IN HIS STUDIO AT THE HOTEL BIRON.]