Je t’aime, Camille

a tale of art, love, and madness

In the photograph, the sculptress rests her hands on the hip of a disfigured female form. The statue is real-woman-sized; the skin is rough and raw. Her naked torso slumps heavily to the left; her head has fallen upon her shoulder. The sculptress holds a small carving knife, gazing quietly at her half-formed creation. The women look comfortable with one another, like they share a secret that’s being kept safe in the stillness between them. They are beautiful, albeit somehow forlorn, as though weighed down by the kind of thoughts that no one else can ever know.

The story of French artists Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin began in Paris in 1883. She was a sculptress and he a sculptor; together they made art and love. When they first met she was a student at Académie Colarossi, and he was her tutor, but their liaison soon transcended amity to a place of deeper affection. Rapt by her talent, Rodin asked Claudel to join his studio as an assistant circa 1884, it is said that a romance blossomed between the pair in the year that followed. But theirs was not a story that ended with a happily ever after, nor was it defined by the clichéd dynamic between the artistic master and his sweet, acquiescent muse. Theirs was a love entangled in equal measures of passion and respect, not only for one another but also for their craft. They say that, in Claudel, Rodin found not only a muse but also an alter ego, while she relished his protective (if borderline paternalistic) ways, savouring his instructive tutelage just as much as his intimate affection. Today, we remember Rodin as the father of modern sculpture. But Claudel’s reputation, despite her own artistic distinction, has been ostensibly formed by her role as Rodin’s muse, lover, and protégé, darkened by the eventual deterioration of her mental health—a biographical footnote that features arguably too prominently in the stories told of the sculptress’ life.

Given our fascination with the artists who’ve been canonised as culturally significant, that Rodin’s star has shone brighter than Claudel’s in the history of art comes as no surprise. As countless textbooks demonstrate, less attention is paid to those who, like Claudel, play a role in the initial provocation of the artistic vision—the (mostly) women who pose in the shadows of the clay and/or canvas. Even so, as American novelist and essayist Francine Prose explains in her book The Lives of the Muses, the desire to explain the mystery of an artist’s inspiration—whether it’s a place, a feeling, or a lover—is inherent in us all. While the secret of how an artwork is born serves its own kind of pleasure, we also crave to discover the catalyst for its existence. And so we look around, as Prose postulates, for some myth to help explain, or at least surround, the genesis of art.

‘The logical solution to the mystery of creation is divine intervention—a simple enough explanation, except for the dizzying speed with which our ideas about divinity change from era to era, from culture to culture. The Greeks assumed that a deity had to be involved. Significantly, they picked goddesses—nine of them—and had the common sense to make these celestial sisters more abstract, private, and distant than their heavenly colleagues.’

These nine Muses ruled over the arts, offering inspiration to (mostly) men. They were the daughters of Zeus, lord of all gods, and Mnemosyne, who represented memory. They are often depicted as wearing a billowing peplos or chiton, and they usually have nice hair. From Greek mythology to 19th century Paris, the muse had developed from the otherworldly to the real, from goddess to woman. And since France’s patriarchal culture expected women to become one of only three things—la madone (a mother), la séductrice (a prostitute), or la muse (an object of a dream)—the unmarried Claudel and lover of Rodin was categorised as the latter, almost by default. But unlike the nine Muses mythologised by the ancient Greeks, Claudel was not only an offering of inspiration, nor was she just a silhouette to be sculpted in Rodin’s artful gaze. She was a woman with a vision of her own, an artist whose eyes dared to wander where a female’s gaze was (at the time) not permitted to stray. In the words of French journalist Octave Mirbeau, she was ‘a revolt against nature: a woman genius’, at a time when the label of genius was given mostly to men. Undeterred by societal expectations, she surrendered herself to her greatest love, art, proving that she was not afraid of abandoning cultural norms to satisfy the depths of her creative drive.

It was Claudel’s strong character that is said to have so enticed Rodin. In an undated letter he wrote to his lover in a moment of distress—most likely in the aftermath of a quarrel—the artist describes their liaison as an encounter so powerful it altered his entire state of being.

‘I kiss your hands, my love, you give me such exalted and ardent enjoyment, near you my soul lives intensely and in its passionate love my respect for you is always above everything, the respect I have for your character, for you my Camille is a cause of my violent passion ... I don’t regret anything neither the end which appears like a funeral. My life will have fallen into an abyss. But my soul has had its blossoming, late alas. I had to know you. And everything changed into an unknown life, my dull existence burned in a bonfire. Thank you because I owe everything to you, the part of heaven which I had in my life ... I am intoxicated when I am near you.’

But despite the intensity of their infatuation, this intoxicating love was not enough to sober other tensions. In 1898, feeling that Rodin would never leave his other lover, Rose Beuret—a former model and mother of his child—Claudel ended their romantic liaison. Their years together had been defined by a tumultuous kind of bliss, a passion that was slowly poisoned by his refusal to stay true to her and her alone, and by Claudel’s mounting jealousy and increasing paranoia. Though they spent each day together sculpting in his Paris atelier, Rodin returned home each night to his awaiting Rose. For Claudel, the humiliation of their circumstances eventually proved too much to bear, and so she walked away, wounded but determined to redefine the future she’d once envisaged with Rodin.

By the time of their separation, Claudel had long emerged from the shadow of her lover, claiming respectable autonomy by establishing her own distinct aesthetic. Hers was a style reminiscent of both antiquity and Renaissance art, characterised by a signature haunting disequilibrium, a potential reflection of her increasingly fractured state of mind. But what is most profound was her ability to traverse each excruciating inch of the human psyche, from jadedness to joy, tragedy to triumph, unconditional love to unbearable heartbreak—sometimes exploring contrasting foci simultaneously. Naturally, we can never know what evoked the emotionality in Claudel’s oeuvre, but it has been said that many of her pieces echo—whether consciously or by chance—both the tenderness and tumultuousness of her own story. In the decade after her breakup with Rodin, Claudel experienced some of the most prolific years of her career. It was during this period that one of her most famous, and allegedly autobiographic, sculptures was born.

Created at a time when Claudel’s mental state was in deterioration, The Age of Maturity depicts a man torn between death-like old age and a pleading figure of youth shown in a position of utter desperation. In the earliest ver- sion of the famous sculpture (1883), the youth’s hands still touch those of the central figure, but in the final piece (1899) they have lost their grasp as he is violently dragged away from her outstretched arms. Understandably, many believe that the central figure is indeed Rodin, a man torn between his ageing mistress and his youthful lover. So reminiscent is this of Rodin and Claudel’s own tragic love, even her brother, Paul, a French poet and diplomat, admitted to the hauntingly autobiographical nature of the work.

‘This naked young woman, it’s my sister! My sister Camille ... Imploring, humiliated, on her knees, and naked! It is all over! That is why she has allowed us to look at her. And do you know something? What is being wrenched away from her, in this very moment, before your eyes, is her soul!’

If it were true that Claudel’s soul was being wrenched from her in The Age of Maturity, her sanity would soon be next. After leaving Rodin, she moved to Quai Bourbon, her last workshop, where she spent most of her time alone. By 1905, her state of solitude deepened further: she disappeared for long periods of time, destroyed many of her statues, and exhibited ever-increasing signs of acute paranoia. Eventually, in 1913, her mother and brother had her committed to the psychiatric hospital Ville-Évrard, an asylum situated on the outskirts of Paris. But for Claudel, the decline into delirium, the losing sight of the world she had once skilfully sculpted, had begun many years before. In an essay that examines the state of the sculptress’ art from a psychopathological perspective, Professor Othon Bastos of the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, states that Claudel presented the first signs of paranoia in 1883. By the time of her incarceration, her once sharp gaze had been violently distorted.

‘She felt persecuted, avoided everyone, destroyed her creations and had them buried, drank too much and disappeared for long periods of time. In addition to all this, she was ruined, deprived from the least comfort and also in physical misery, which she had imposed on herself ... She was living in extreme poverty along with street cats, always dressed in a white gown, dishevelled hair, crying out curses on Rodin ... She feared getting poisoned by him. Likewise, in hospital, she feared food without skin. During the 30 years of her confinement, she did not create a single work of art.’

In September 1914, Claudel was transferred to the Montdevergues Asylum, at Montfavet, where she lived until her death in October 1943. Her certificate of admittance stated that she suffered from systematic persecution delirium, a syndrome characterised by her delusions of oppression and mounting misbeliefs that were centred on Rodin. In the end, her greatest love became her greatest fear; her role as la muse, the object of a dream, degraded to the role of tormented soul—a woman who had fallen victim to the aberrance of her own mind. But Camille Claudel was never a mere muse, at least not in the mythological sense, nor was she just a patient imprisoned within the cruel confines of a mental institution. To label her as such not only maligns her memory, it also dilutes the importance of the art she left behind—an oeuvre of work created by an artist whose eyes dared to penetrate the places where few women were brave enough to gaze, surrendering to the imperative of her imagination in order to serve her soul.

Since her death, the portrait of Claudel has been painted in many different shapes, mostly as the muse of the great Auguste Rodin who eventually lost her mind. But that’s not who she was.

The story of French artist Camille Claudel is one that we can never properly tell. ‘I don’t want to say anything,’ she once mused, ‘because I know I am unable to protect you from the harm that I see.’ And so she sculpted instead, leaving behind carvings of a woman who was, above all, the most in love with art.

In the photograph, Camille Claudel rests her hands on the hip of a disfigured female form. She is holding a small carving knife, gazing quietly at her creation. When I close my eyes and imagine Claudel, this is whom I see. The women look comfortable with one another, like they share a secret that’s kept safe in the stillness between them. A secret that we will never know.

This essay was first published in JANE magazine.