Paris Kiss Read Free

turned back to Rodin and me.
    â€˜ Maître ,’ I said. And oh, the thrill of using that word! ‘I’m so pleased you could take me on as your pupil.’
    Rodin inclined his head over my hand and dropped it in the French manner I still find slightly disconcerting – at once intimate and dismissive. He smoothed his beard and studied me. His eyes were the startling blue of glaciated ice but when he took off his thick glasses to clean them, he blinked like a mole coming out of the ground.
    â€˜Mademoiselle Lipscomb, it will be my pleasure to teach you. Alphonse wrote to me and had nothing but the highest praise for your talents.’ He smiled and I basked in the sunlit warmth of his attention. Rodin rubbed his hands together – oddly, he had not taken off his gloves – and walked over to my table. ‘Let me have a look at your work. This head is yours?’
    I was filled with alarm. ‘I have only just started it, Maître .’
    â€˜Good. I like to catch a piece early, before it takes the wrong direction.’ He circled the table, examining the figure from all angles. He stopped and closed his eyes. Like a blind man, he placed his hands gently on the clay face and felt its contours, as if he were caressing a lover. I felt like a houseguest who has stepped into the wrong bedroom. I glanced at Camille and saw she was transfixed, her mouth parted and a flush on her cheek. Rodin dropped his hands and stepped back, breaking the spell. He leaned on his stick for a moment as if considering his response, and I held my breath while I waited.
    Rodin banged his stick on the wooden floor and I jumped as the crack sounded around the room.
    â€˜While the piece is technically proficient…’
    I steeled myself for the codicil.
    â€˜â€¦it is dead.’
    I gasped as if winded and thought for a moment I was going to be sick.
    Rodin circled the bust, which I had been so proud of only a few moments earlier and could now see was the work of a fraud, and pointed at it with his stick. ‘I may as well be looking at a photograph of Mademoiselle Claudel.’
    He said photograph as if it were an insult. The technology was in its infancy then and many artists feared it would make our profession redundant. I decided not to tell my tutor that my young man William had been showing me how to use his camera and how I’d started experimenting with reflections and lighting.
    Rodin was in full swing now. ‘You have, it is true, caught Camille’s likeness, but in doing so you have killed her, just as if you had stuck a pin through her heart. She is like a butterfly in a glass case – beautiful but dead.’
    He pounded the floor again with his stick and I flinched at every ricochet.
    â€˜Where is her energy?’ Bang!
    â€˜Where is her spirit?’ Bang!
    â€˜An artist stands naked before the world. What do you feel when you look at your friend? Admiration? Jealousy? Desire? Hatred? I see nothing in this piece – only technique, which I do not decry, but it does not make you stand out. Mademoiselle Lipscomb, you must sculpt from your gut as well as your head. Then, and only then, will you become a true artist.’
    Rodin was right, of course, I know that now, but his comments rained down on me like burning embers from Mount Vesuvius. I wasn’t used to being eviscerated in this way. My tutors at South Kensington had always been effusive about my work, said it was like that of a man – the highest praise a woman artist could hope for in those days. Now my shame burned all the brighter in front of Camille, who stood silently at my side. I glanced at her. Was that a shadow of a smirk? I clenched my fists so my nails dug into my palms and told myself this was why I was here – to learn. My dismay must have shown in my face and Rodin softened his tone. He laid his hand lightly on my shoulder and, to my horror, tears pricked my eyes; I tried desperately to blink