You Must Change Your Life (20 page)

Rodin invited Rilke to stay with him for as long as he wished. He
welcomed him into his inner circle immediately, taking him to lunch with Eugène Carrière and the critic Charles Morice. Rilke attended gatherings at Rodin's Paris studio. The artist even asked Rilke for advice on titling sculptures, a task at which Rodin was never very talented.

At the end of Rilke's stay, Rodin had an idea. He still needed to fill Edgard Varèse's position with someone he could trust. He had briefly tried to employ his son, but the younger Auguste could not keep up with the pace of Rodin's correspondence. Who could be more suited for the role than a faithful writer like Rilke? Rodin offered him the job.

In those days, a secretary position was typically held by a man and consisted of managing the day-to-day correspondence of celebrities and the wealthy. Rodin would pay Rilke two hundred francs a month to open his mail and answer letters, and would provide housing in a cottage on his property in Meudon. He promised that the job would not be too taxing, only about two hours each morning, which would leave plenty of time for Rilke's own work.

The poet was so honored that the master would entrust him with his important business matters that the offer made his “head spin.”

But wasn't his French too poor? he asked. Rodin shrugged; the poet seemed to be a fast learner.

Now Rilke was delirious. It was “his deepest desire fulfilled: to move in with Rodin, to belong to him totally,” Andreas-Salomé later reflected.

Rilke could not have agreed more. “I shall come to the great man, dear as a father, the Master,” Rilke wrote to a friend of the job. “He wants me to live with him, and I could not do otherwise than accept; so I shall be allowed to share all his days, and my nights will be surrounded by the same things as his.” Rilke used nearly the same words to write his acceptance letter to Rodin, telling the artist that it would be his honor to listen to him day and night, “if you'll deign to speak to me.”

And so, in September 1905, Rilke became not just a fervent disciple of Rodin, but his trusty, day-to-day associate. Rilke moved into his personal three-room cottage with views of the Sèvres valley. As he looked out the window, the bridge linking the two banks of the Seine “has become a stanza. And there my life is.” A renewed sense of “
joie de vivre
” rushed through him as never before.

CHAPTER
9

R
ILKE ROSE WITH RODIN AT SEVEN O'CLOCK EVERY MORNING
. Sometimes he saw the artist out his window, pacing the garden in his robe before changing into his country attire of sandals and a floppy beret. They sat down together for a light breakfast of fruit and coffee, and then the poet faced the mail pile.

“Rilke plunged into the work,” recalled one of Rodin's assistants. “For the first time Rodin's correspondence was punctual, his files in order.” It was no easy task. Rodin rarely conducted sales through an art dealer, which made him responsible for all his own paperwork. He monitored and micromanaged every word his secretaries wrote in letters. He also changed his mind rapidly, made perpetual revisions and asked that every fleeting observation that passed through his lips be recorded. He never knew if it might become relevant for a speech or text down the line.

Other than a visit from Westhoff in October, Rilke saw virtually no one but Rodin over the next few months, and that was fine by him. They talked about “everything” together, and just as often sat side by side in silence. Sometimes Rilke waited for Rodin to return from Paris so they could watch the sun set over the pool, which was graced with Rodin's young swans. Rodin loved these birds so much that when the
first ones appeared, wild and gray, he hired hunters to kill all the frogs and toads they could find in the woods to feed to the swans.

After sundown Rodin would bid Rilke good night with the words,
Bon courage
. The sentiment confused Rilke at first, but later the poet thought he understood. Rodin must have wished him strength because he knew “how necessary that is, every day, when one is young.”

Now that Rodin had so much assistance in his studio, he had more free time to travel. Whenever possible Rilke joined him on these day trips to the cathedrals or the countryside. He had decided to make use of his renewed proximity to Rodin to gather material for a second essay on the artist, which he would eventually publish as part two in all future editions of the monograph. Rilke wrote down everything now, like young Plato recording the words of Socrates, the master who never put pen to paper.

Three mornings in a row the pair rose at five o'clock to catch a train, then a carriage, to Versailles, where they walked for hours in the park. “He shows you everything: a distant view, a movement, a flower, and everything he invokes is so beautiful, so known, so startled and young,” Rilke told Westhoff. “The smallest things come to him and open up to him.”

Rilke would point out interesting sights and Rodin would draw conclusions from them. While Rodin was ethralled by a cage of Chinese pheasants at the zoo one winter day, Rilke jotted down descriptions of sickly monkeys with eyes as big and vacant as tuberculosis patients'; the sight of a flamingo's tropic-pink feathers “blossoming in this chill air” was almost painful. He then turned the sculptor's attention to the baboons, “flinging themselves against the wall.” It was as if Mother Nature had been too busy to correct their “unspeakable hideousness,” he said, and her cruelty had driven them mad.

Well, Rodin reasoned, it must have taken a lot of experimentation before she was able to perfect life with the human form. One could at least be grateful to the baboons for that.

Sometimes Rose Beuret joined them on these excursions and Rilke began to see why Rodin had stayed with her all these years. She was
able to identify all the species of birds and trees in the woods. She was so like Rodin in this way, taking joy in a purple burst of crocus or a magpie balanced on a branch. Once she found an injured partridge and they had to leave early so she could care for it. She was a “good and faithful soul,” Rilke decided.

There was a tenderly muted affection between Rodin and Beuret. One December afternoon, the three of them attended the two o'clock Advent Sunday service at Notre Dame. Beuret, always anticipating her companion's needs before he did, set out two chairs for the men. The artist sat down, put his hat in his lap and closed his eyes. For nearly two hours he stayed there with his head bowed, beard splayed across his chest, listening to the organ and the soprano, whose voice soared up the cathedral like a “white bird,” Rilke thought. Sometimes a faint smile crossed his face. When the music ended, he got up, went to Beuret, who had been waiting patiently, and they left the church, without a word spoken the entire afternoon.

Together the three of them formed a little family in Meudon. In November, the poet joined Rodin and Beuret to celebrate the sculptor's birthday with a cake decorated with sixty-five candles. The following month, the three of them again treated themselves to pastries for Rilke's thirtieth birthday.

Rilke, Rose Beuret, and Rodin in Meudon
.

A few weeks later, Rilke returned to Germany to spend Christmas with Westhoff and Ruth. By now his wife had moved their daughter out of her mother's house and into a place of their own. When Rilke arrived she was sculpting a bust of Ruth, which was not an easy task with a restless four-year-old. It had been so long since they were all together as a family that they agreed to forgo work for a few days and enjoy the holiday.

In Rilke's absence, the letters piled up in Meudon. When he returned in January, he was saddled with more work than ever. He did not realistically have time to accept Rodin's invitation to visit the cathedral in Chartres that month. But this was the “Acropolis of France,” Rodin said, and he insisted that there was no lesson “so useful to study as our French Cathedrals and, above all, this one!” Rodin often said he wished that he had skipped art school altogether to spend the time bowed before the Chartres cathedral instead. The cathedral was the wisest master, he thought, a masterpiece of light and shadow that could have taught Rembrandt everything he knew about chiaroscuro.

Rodin understood that it could be difficult to appreciate Gothic architecture at first. The labyrinthine decorations could easily overwhelm an untrained eye. But he believed that people ought to relearn how to see the cathedrals, and to recall the kind of schoolboy wonderment that he had once felt before the church in Beauvais. “The chief thing is to humble one's self and become a little child, to be content not to master all at once, to be obedient to what Nature can teach, and to be patient through years and years,” he wrote.

So on a gray, lightless January morning, Rilke and Rodin passed through wheat fields for an hour on the train, arriving in Chartres at half-past nine. The church sat alone at the center of town like an old stone gargoyle. From around its huge walls, the clusters of cottages unfurled like a diorama village. Built between 1194 and 1235, the Notre Dame of Chartres is one of the largest cathedrals in France, with a nave nearly twice as wide as the Notre Dame of Paris.

Rilke and Rodin stood at a reverent distance, tilting their heads back to take in the full scale of the structure's two towers, which were mismatched as a result of a fire. The fifty-foot-tall buttresses aged from blond at the base to a weathered black at the tips. Stone vines and arabesques uncoiled across every inch of surface. Normally Rodin would have taken it in inch by inch without a word, but on that day he kept interrupting the silence to grumble about the shoddy restorations that scarred its surface. The right lateral portal was stripped of its “suppleness,” and parts of the stained glass were missing from the windows. The damage was even worse here than at the Notre Dame in Paris.

The numbing cold became another distraction as a gust of wind barreled into Rilke as hard as a man shoving through a crowd. He glanced over at Rodin to see if he felt it, too, but the man stood there oblivious, as sturdy as the tower. Then another gust blew in violently from the east and whipped around the slender stone body of an angel that stood on a southern corner of the church. It smiled a wise and serene smile, like that of the Mona Lisa, Rilke thought, and it held a sundial in its hands.

In the presence of this blissful stone being, the windbeaten poet felt even more mortal, as if he and Rodin were “two damned souls.”

At last Rilke spoke: “There's a storm coming up.”

“But you don't understand,” Rodin countered. “There is always this kind of wind around the great cathedrals. They are always enveloped by a wind that is agitated, tormented by their grandeur.”

The freezing weather drove the two men back to Paris early that day. But not before the sharp gusts of wind had opened Rilke up and lodged an image of the stone angel firmly in his mind.

IN THE CRYPT OF
the Panthéon lie the remains of the foremost intellectual figures in French history. “For great men the grateful nation,” reads the inscription carved into the façade of the domed mausoleum where Voltaire, Zola, Rousseau and Hugo were laid to rest. More than
a burial ground, the Panthéon became the illustrious mise-en-scène of France's national memory in the years after the French Revolution.

It was the highest endorsement of Rodin's career to date, then, when the city of Paris agreed to erect
The Thinker
in front of the Panthéon's grand staircase in the spring of 1906. It filled Rodin with pride to know that his statue would memorialize all of the thinkers housed within its walls, a monument to end all monuments.

The art historian Élie Faure saw the plan as France's attempt to correct its mistreatment of Rodin after the “outrage inflicted on him for so long.” The doors that had been closing on him for half a century, ever since he failed to enter the Grande École as a boy, had finally swung open. Newly initiated into this civic shrine, Rodin began to enjoy what he called his period of “liberation.”