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little more than, “All right, that’s very good.” The students, bored by the scientific minutiae, amused themselves by making fun of the old man’s cheap suits and the way his shirt buttons fought to contain his paunch.
    In a decision he would come to regret, Rodin dropped out before the end of the term. He later learned that the professor was a true master in disguise: Antoine-Louis Barye, one of the finest animal sculptors in European history. Sometimes called the “Michelangelo of the Ménagerie,” Barye had been examining the caged carnivores of the Jardin since 1825, often with his friend the painter Eugène Delacroix. When an animal died, Barye was first on the scene to dissect it and compare its measurements to those in his drawings. Once, in 1828, Delacroix notified him of a new cadaver by writing, “The lion is dead. Come at a gallop.”
    Barye was a former goldsmith who defied the rigid realism of the day with wildly expressive bronzes. In his hands, a gnu being strangled by a python did not merely collapse to the ground in defeat. Instead, the beast’s body merged with the serpent’s coil as it sucked away its life and identity in what became a potent allegory for the dehumanization of war. Reviewing Barye’s work in the 1851 ParisSalon, the critic Edmond de Goncourt wrote that Barye’s Jaguar Devouring a Hare marked the death of historicist sculpture and the triumph of modern art.
    There was no shortage of demand for work by the great animalier , but Barye was a perfectionist who refused to sell anything that did not live up to his exacting standards. Thus he never earned the money to match his talent and went through life looking like a pauper.
    It was not until Rodin reached middle age that he finally recognized the significance of Barye’s animal studies. The epiphany came to him one afternoon while strolling down a Paris street, gazing absentmindedly into the shop windows. A pair of bronze greyhounds in one of the displays caught his eye: “They ran. They were here, they were there; not for an instant did they remain in one spot,” he said of the sculptures. When he looked closer he saw that they bore the signature of his old professor.
    â€œAn idea came to me suddenly and enlightened me; this is art, this is the revelation of the great mystery; how to express movement in something that is at rest,” Rodin said. “Barye had found the secret.”
    From then on, motion became the dominant concern in Rodin’s work. He began intuiting tiny gestures—the curve of a model’s arm or a bend in the spine—and amplifying them into new, large-scale actions. His human figures took on an animal intensity; in sculpting one especially muscular model he said he imagined her as a panther. Years later the critic Gustave Geffroy identified Rodin’s debt to his old master. Rodin “takes up the art of sculpture where Barye left off; from the lives of animals he proceeds to the animal life of human beings,” he wrote in in La Justice .
    Once Rodin had discovered his task—to express inner feelings through outward movement—his work departed further from that of his historical heroes and began to fall into step with the flux and anxiety of the rapidly modernizing world around him.

CHAPTER
2

    I N A CHILDHOOD DREAM, THE YOUNG POET LAY ON A BED OF dirt beside an open grave. A tombstone etched with the name “René Rilke” loomed overhead. He did not dare lift a limb for fear that the slightest movement might topple the heavy stone and knock him into the grave. The only way to escape his paralysis was to somehow change the engraving on the stone from his name to his sister’s. He did not know how to do it, but he understood that freedom required rewriting his fate.
    The fear of being crushed by a rock became a recurring theme in the boy’s nightmares. It wasn’t in every case a tombstone, but it was