Auguste Rodin's Les bourgeois de Calais, Pas-de-Calais (62)

This statue, Les Bourgeois de Calais in front of the mairie in Calais, was sculpted by Auguste Rodin in bronze in 1895, and it is the first of twelve originals. The figures are Eustache de Saint Pierre, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant, Jean de Fiennes, Andrieu d'Andres and Jean d'Aire, the six city leaders who in 1347 surrendered to the English king, Edward III, in return for him saving the city during the Hundred Years' War. A very powerful creation.

Camille Claudel, Montfavet, Vaucluse (84)

Camille Claudel (1864–1943), the sister of the dramatist and poet Paul Claudel, was a French sculptor perhaps best known for her relationship with Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). She was born in Fère-en-Tardenois (Aisne) and died in the psychiatric hospital in Montedvergues, Montfavet. There, in July 2018, they will erect a memorial to Camille Claudel: unfortunately, we'll be elsewhere.

She met Rodin in the Académie Colarossi in Paris, becoming his student, assistant and lover. After their separation she became reclusive, attempting to free herself from the artistic style of Rodin. After the marriage of her formerly supportive brother she became a recluse in her workshop. The victim of an obsessive neurosis, she destroyed most of her works. Following the death of her father in 1913 her mother interned her in a psychiatric hosptial in Seine-Saint-Denis. She was transferred to Montfavet two years later, where she remained until her death almost thirty years later, essentially caused by malnutrition, which was normal in such hospitals during the war.

She was initially buried in a plot in Montfavet cemetery, but her remains were moved to the cemetery's then anonymous communal ossuary about 1951. Her great-niece Reine-Marie Paris had a cenotaph erected, which includes two quotations from her great-aunt.

 

'There is always something missing which torments me'

'My great wish, my ideal, is to fashion my shapings of the paste into an idea! The idea isn't enough for me: I want to clothe it in purple and crown it in gold'.

The Rodin Museum / Le Musée Rodin, 7th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #33

The Rodin Museum was established in 1916 after three donations by Auguste Rodin (1840—1917) to the French state of his works, collections, library, letters, and manuscripts. It is where the former hôtel Biron was, which Rodin had rented from 1908.

A plaque stating that (the poet) Rainer-Maria Rilke lived there from 1908-1911.

The museum gardens have a number sculptures relating to literature. This in bronze (1902—04) is The Three Shadows (Les Trois Ombres), and is a representation from Dante's The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), with its warning: 'Abandon hope all you who enter here'. The three figures are identical, and Rodin gives them back the hands missing from them at the top of his work The Door to Hell (La Porte de'L'enfer) (1880—1917).

Rodin worked on La Porte de l'Enfer for many years, drawing on the figures (over 200) here for the rest of his working life.

He died before seeing the full masterpiece put together in cast iron.

The Victor Hugo monument.

A detail of the monument to Hugo.

In a gallery of marble exhibits there are several representations of Hugo.

There is also a bust of George Bernard Shaw, made in 1906.

On the other side of the hotel is the statue of Balzac.

Finally, it would probably be a mistake to exclude Le Penseur (The Thinker).