French Kiss by Stacy Travis

Author:Stacy Travis [Travis, Stacy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fast Turtle Press
Published: 2020-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

18

Love in Marble

July 11

Paris

It was only a few minutes’ walk to the Rodin Museum, which hid behind tall gates in the seventh arrondissement. Across the street, a couple of police officers stood guard outside a building. The grounds consisted of crushed gravel paths leading past manicured hedges in conical shapes and well-placed sculptures in front of the museum itself—a massive rococo building, the Hôtel Biron, that had been built in the eighteenth century as a home for a French financier.

We wandered past The Thinker, which was cast in white marble and surrounded by rose bushes and tall conical hedges, then we walked to The Gates of Hell, with three bronze figures on top of an enormous doorway, which I remembered from a college art history book. I hadn’t paid much attention in art history, and I regretted it.

I’d taken the class as a filler in my schedule when I couldn’t get an organic chemistry course one semester, and I was grateful for the break from my science classes. I’d skipped out on some of the reading, however, and standing among these sculptures, I felt like I should know more about them and at least a little bit about Rodin himself.

Fortunately, Josh had paid better attention somewhere along the way. “Rodin made plaster casts for some of his iron sculptures, so you’ll find them in other museums. He made more than one of most of them. And for some, he went on to chisel them from marble as well,” Josh was saying. I was partly listening, my senses on overload from the beauty of the marble forms all around us and the light breeze that swept past us. Josh was telling me about Camille Claudel, Rodin’s muse. “You’ll see some of her work inside the museum.”

I was overwhelmed by what I saw inside. The Hôtel Biron had been built and decorated in fine detail, but now sculptures filled every room. Some were tiny, barely a foot tall, sitting on pedestals. Others were larger than life-sized, set in the center of a room. I couldn’t believe the craftsmanship and patience required to sand and polish a block of marble into one of these sculptures, let alone the vision and artistry that pulled a female medusa from a chunk of stone.

My favorite was a large sculpture called Le Baiser, which was a couple entwined in a kiss, arms and legs wrapped around each other and faces connected. I couldn’t get over how much love Rodin captured in a piece of marble. I stared at it for ten minutes before I realized Josh was hovering in the doorway of the gallery, waiting for me.

“It’s amazing,” I said.

“I know. I’ve been to this museum at least five times, and I never get tired of the sculptures.”

“But this one…” I didn’t even really know what to say. I couldn’t describe why it moved me so much. “You can just feel the passion between them. And it’s made of marble. He created all that feeling from marble.”

Josh smiled.

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