At this period Rodin certainly knew nothing of the great contemplatives of the fourteenth century or of this same Ruysbroeck whom later a glorious compatriot, Maurice Maeterlinck, kinsman by election of the hermit, was to translate and interpret; but in the peaceful glade, the vallon vert, as under the vaults of the great forest, the soul of the sculptor rejoined those of the old monks who perhaps still wander there at times; it shared with them the religion of this beauty which their dumb love of nature had come thither to seek. At dawn he would start out, loaded down with his box of colors. His companion followed him, proud to carry part of the artist's paraphernalia. He was on his way to make sketches, to take notes of the landscape, to jot down his impressions; but often the day passed without his touching his brushes. It was not indifference or indolence on the part of this great worker, but simply that he had not the strength to interrupt his delightful contemplations. Time lost? In the case of another, perhaps. Not for him. His excursion had no immediate result; that was all: but how he would observe, how he would compare, how he would reflect! He was initiating himself in the sense of proportion, grandeur of style, and the nobility of simplicity. He was studying the laws of the light and shade distributed by the columns the true work of the architect. It was no longer school lessons that he was prosecuting here; it was the mighty exercise of personal talent, the ripening of his taste that was taking place, thanks to the technical knowledge he already possessed. The sense of the eternal laws comes only to those who can contrail them through long experience. Later, when the time came for Rodin to visit the cathedrals, he was to understand better than any other this art which has sprung from the forests of France, engendered by their mysterious grandeur, once full of terrors and marvels. The benefit which he derived immediately from his acquaintance with Belgium was the experience of those intellectual joys and that happiness which await any one who is serious, loyal, reverent in the presence of the divine work that offers itself as an object of study to the assiduous. Another besides himself had already received this teaching of nature in exactly this place. Rude, whom the Bourbons had exiled on their return to France because of his worship of Napoleon, passed several years in Brussels and executed there a number of works, among others the famous bas-reliefs of the Château de Tervueren, since destroyed by fire; "La Chasse de Méléagre," of which the authorities of the Belgian department of fine arts were fortunately able to take casts. On his way between Brussels and Tervueren, Rude went every day several leagues on foot, crossing the Forest of Soignes, where he, too, endeavored to forget the lessons of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, on the benches of which he had, according to his own confession, lost many years.