Table of Contents for this Episode
Categories: French Culture, French History
[00:00:00]
Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 610, six cent dix.
Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
Today on the podcast: Camille Claudel
Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about Camille Claudel, the brilliant sculptor who worked alongside Auguste Rodin, only to be betrayed by her own family.
She was committed to an asylum for the last 30 years of her life. Her story is one of talent, tragedy, and a family secret that took decades to come to light.
Support and Updates
Annie: Before we start, this show runs on listener [00:01:00] support. If you want to work with me directly, I do itinerary consults. I’ve created eight tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, and I do day trips around the southwest of France in my electric car.
Everything is at joinusinfrance.com/boutique. And if you shop on Amazon anyway, starting at joinusinfrance.com/amazon costs you nothing but helps the show.
Magazine segment
Annie: There won’t be a Magazine part of the podcast today again because this recording ran long again, and because I was away in Brittany, and then I decided to go to Spain for a few days for a chance to experience the full eclipse of the sun that will be visible from Vilanova i la Geltrú, but not from Toulouse.
And also, a little bit of beach time is good for my soul.
But my thanks to my patrons who make this show possible, and to join this wonderful community of Francophiles, go to [00:02:00] patreon.com/joinus. And to support the wonderful Elyse, go to patreon.com/elysart.
My thanks also to all the listeners who checked out my new channel, Join Us in France Video, on YouTube. I’m putting out a lot of short videos, some in English, some in French, and I hope to see you there.
Camille Claudel
Annie: Bonjour, Elyse.
Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie: Ah, we have an artsy woman today, the lovely Camille Claudel.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: I love the name Camille.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: And I do love her art. I’ve seen quite a bit of hers recently. But of course, this is an art history sort of [00:03:00] thing, so you’re going to take it away, Elyse, because… because I, you know, I mean, I’ve read a bit, but you’re the specialist.
Camille In Museums
Elyse: Well, I think, anybody who’s visited France, and certainly anybody who has been to Paris, probably has seen some of her work. She was a sculptor. She of course is known and very, very closely associated with the great sculptor Auguste Rodin.
And in the Rodin Museum, which is certainly an absolutely wonderful museum to visit in the seventh arrondissement there is a room devoted to her work. Most of her work, there’s some of her work also in the Orsay Museum, and of course in various other museums scattered all over, including here in, in Toulouse, a couple of pieces.
Annie: Yes, I saw a lot of hers at the art museum in Rouen. They had several pieces of hers, and I thought that was very interesting.
Like [00:04:00] perhaps a dozen or so. You know.
Elyse: They had that many, yeah.
Annie: Yes, they did. Yeah, they did, yeah.
Elyse: Well, it’s interesting. At the end, we’ll talk a little bit about why right now, in fact, there are more pieces showing up in different places, but I’ll save that as part of the story, towards the end. But in fact, of course, some people probably do know, that one of the parts of the story about Camille Claudel was how the second half of her life was extremely tragic.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: Really is the correct word to use, huh? For various reasons. So, what we have of her work is really from the first part of her life, probably like we could say up until the age of maybe 38, 39, which means that she was extremely prolific anyway. And then of course there’s the rest of the story, and that, of course, is part of the story of Camille Claudel.
We probably start from the beginning because it makes a lot more sense that way.
Early Life And Family
Elyse: She was born in [00:05:00] 1864. She actually didn’t die until 1943. She was just about 79 when she died. But, all of her production was clearly before the age of 40.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: So she was born into an upper middle class family, a rather conservative, very Catholic family. Her father was what the French like to call an haut fonctionnaire. Yeah.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: So he had… I can’t remember, to be honest. I didn’t note down even exactly what he did. But haut fonctionnaire basically means he worked for the government in a high up position. She was born in a small town east of Paris, up in the north. But eventually, there were two or three times when the family moved because her father had this job that moved him around a little bit.
Annie: Sure. Haut fonctionnaire, they are at the service of the government, and they can be sent wherever, you know.
Elyse: Wherever, yeah. Right. So she was in fact, originally she should have been the second child in this [00:06:00] family, but she wound up being the oldest because she had a brother who died very young before she was born. And then she was born in 1864, and two years later she had a sister named Louise, and then two years after that, a brother named Paul.
Annie: Who was also famous.
Elyse: Who is very famous, and who also is very implicated in the eventual story of her life.
Annie: And as far as I know, he was just an author, right? He didn’t…
Elyse: No, he was also a diplomat.
Annie: Ah, yes. Okay.
Elyse: He managed to work his way up the social scale to be very highly positioned. He was a successful writer who was a successful poet. But even before then, he began working in the diplomatic service, and he actually was a diplomat,
So, it turns out that, Camille was the “chouchoue” of her daddy. She was the little favorite, and apparently at a very, very, very early age, how she was put in contact with it, I don’t know, but she [00:07:00] developed an interest in working not only with her hands, but actually modeling things.
I mean, of … certainly in 1864, they didn’t have Play-Doh, okay? But whatever was around, it turns out that she would start working with it, modeling it. And so very early on, her father recognized that this was something she was not only interested in, but she seemed to have a certain talent. This was something that she did her entire life. And so as she got to be into her early, early, early adolescence, her father allowed her to have some lessons with a local sculptor where they were living. The professor, basically came back and said, “You know, your daughter is really quite talented, she should really be able to go to an atelier.” And of course, we’re talking about a time. So this professor, basically convinced her father that it would be a good idea to allow her to have real art lessons [00:08:00] and sculpture lessons. And from the very beginning, her mother was opposed.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: Okay? She said: “This is not what young ladies should do. This is not what young ladies should learn.” She basically wanted her daughters, because she did have two, to be taught the skills of being a housewife and being a mother. And so from the very beginning, her mother was vociferous in being opposed to Camille doing art.
Annie: You know, it’s sadly often the mothers who want to perpetuate female roles in their daughters. Not always only, but it often happens where it’s the mom that insists, “You’re going to be a… going to be just like me. That’s it.”
Elyse: We’ve done some podcasts of some other women who, luckily for them, had more enlightened mothers, you know, and parents, but in the case of Camille, no.
And unfortunately also [00:09:00] for Camille, nothing ever changed, for the rest of her life. I mean, this was just a condition and an attitude that basically destroyed Camille. That’s basically the reality of it.
So what happened was, when her dad allowed her to have some lessons, they were living in a place called Wassy, which is also a place that was famous at some point for having a battle. It’s in the northeast of France.
Annie: As in Roissy Charles de Gaulle?
Elyse: As in W-A-S-S-Y.
Annie: Ah, okay. I was like, what?
Elyse: Right.
Annie: A battle at the airport? What?
Elyse: Right. No.
Paris Training Begins
Elyse: And then what happened was, her father met a sculptor who actually became a sort of friend of his named Alfred Boucher. I don’t think he was related to the painter from the 18th century. And he was so impressed by her talent, her potential, that he convinced the father that she should be able to even have lessons in [00:10:00] Paris, which of course was the center of everything. With Camille also pleading to be given this opportunity, her father arranged for the mother and the kids to move to an apartment in Paris, and they lived on Boulevard de Montparnasse.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: And he was there part of the time, but because he had a job that required him to move, what happened was that he rented the apartment, so the mom with the three kids moved to Paris specifically so she could go to this art academy that allowed young women to join. But this was at the same time with a mother who did not want her to be doing this.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: And so here she is in Paris, apparently happy as could be, we know nothing really about what her personality was like. This is one of the things that intrigues me, because I can tell you everything about what happened to her, but she had to have had a very strong personality, considering [00:11:00] how she lived her life for the next 20, 25 years. But there’s nothing that really describes or documents who she was internally. We just know this need she had to be an artist. And of course, what happened was, this is really the beginning of what becomes her total destiny.
And I was thinking about this the other day, that there’s a difference between destiny and fatality. You know, there’s a destiny. She had a destiny. Her destiny was to be an artist, and of course, unfortunately, other things got involved.
So, this sculptor named Boucher, he got her enrolled in an academy called the Académie Colarossi, that allowed young women. And there she made friends with a young English woman who became a lifelong friend, this woman named Jessie Lipscomb, who also was studying sculpture there, and they really stayed lifelong friends. She was the only one who indeed was her friend for almost the rest of her [00:12:00] life. And Boucher conducted this academy and had assistants, and of course, at the time, that’s what you did. You worked, it wasn’t sit-down classes, you had a master sculptor, and you were an assistant, and the way you learned was by working with the master sculptor. And so you do hands-on work, you know, and then he corrects you, and he gives you specific assignments, little pieces of this to do, pieces of that.
And of course, her preferred material was clay so that she could mold things and then eventually make things that way. And then after one year, what happened was, he had a studio in Rome, this Boucher, and he had work that he was commissioned to do in Rome. And so he told her, among the other, I guess, young assistants, that’s what they were called, that he was leaving and that he had a friend who was a sculptor who was going to take his place.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: …and be the head master [00:13:00] sculptor for these young assistants, who were not only, but largely young women.
Annie: Hmm.
Elyse: And that replacement was Auguste Rodin.
Annie: Ah, okay. It’s interesting that they were mostly young women because, Bourdelle, the other famous French sculptor, he also had an atelier full of women.
Elyse: Yes. Yes, and it’s very interesting to me too that they were allowed to work in a sculpture studio, mostly as assistants, I mean, let’s face it, but much more so than in painting atelier. Now why, I don’t know.
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: It’s kind of curious, you know? It’s odd. Who knows exactly, you know, I mean… that’s another whole subject, I guess, you know. So…
Rodin Arrives
Annie: Rodin shows up.
Elyse: Rodin shows up. Now, it’s another whole podcast or two or three, you know, talking about Rodin but let’s just be concise and talk about [00:14:00] him for a minute. He was already a famous sculptor. He was already known as a womanizer. He was someone who had a hugely dynamic personality and an enormous ego.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: And he was a great sculptor, right? And so within the year, in 1882, she is 18, they become lovers.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: Now, the fact that this is so easy as a transition for her is what makes-
Annie: How old was he then?
Elyse: He was 24 years older than her. So when she was 18, he was 42.
Annie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I… Okay, call me old-fashioned, but I’m not okay with that either.
Elyse: No.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: He had a live-in… I mean, this is kind of an aside, but unfortunately, it is part of the story. He had… He wasn’t married legally ever. I mean, he was three weeks before he died, but he had a live-in wife, if you want to call it that, a [00:15:00] common, what we used to call a common law wife, that he had been living with already for 20 years. He had a child by her that he never recognized, even though they were actually living together. I mean, this is to give you an idea of what he was like as a man.
Annie: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Elyse: And it was a known fact, which apparently did not bother Camille at all, that he took as mistresses various assistants that he had that worked with him. So we can assume, and I’m assuming, that really she had a rebellious artistic personality, and that it was really something that she was okay with, let’s face it, you know…
Annie: Sure. Sure
Elyse: … and she didn’t resist.
Love And Collaboration
Elyse: So from the age of 18, in 1882, for the next 10 years, that’s a long time, they worked together and were lovers.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: That’s a very long time, and in that time period, she became a [00:16:00] brilliant sculptor, and he even wrote later on, because he kept diaries about how talented she was, how brilliant she was. There are photographs of the two of them working on pieces together. She helped him work on some of his most famous pieces, The Kiss, The Doors of Hell that are in the garden of the Rodin Museum, The Burgermeisters of Calais. These were all pieces that she actually helped conceive and work on, and at the same time, she had her own separate little studio where she worked.
So she divided her time to between working with Rodin and doing her own sculpture, which was of course influenced by his style, but she went from basically a kind of art nouveau-ish kind of style to something a lot more impressionistic and very personal and rather emotional. You can see the touch on it because a lot of these pieces, of course, are bronze, which means that they were cast.
And it turns out, and this is [00:17:00] where I wound up doing a lot of research, just to make sure that this is not just a silly rumor, it is almost absolutely certain that during these 10 years, she had at least one child and at least… at least two abortions.
Annie: Hmm.
Elyse: Now, we’re talking about a time period. We’re talking about what? We’re talking about the 1880s, 1890s. There is no such thing really as contraceptive.
Annie: Right. Right.
Elyse: It would’ve been surprising if nothing had actually happened. There is documentation that once or twice for three or four months she went to England to stay with her friend Jessie Lipscomb and disappeared and came back, and it’s almost certain there’s some writing in one of the diaries by Rodin that he paid to have a child taken care of, that was not the child that he had with his live-in.
So in fact, it is [00:18:00] really, really probable that during this period of time, that she did get pregnant several times.
Annie: So the one child that she had, did she take care of this child?
Elyse: Nothing. No, no. This is all… It disappeared out of her life completely in, during this 10-year period.
Annie: Do we know who this child was?
Elyse: All we know is that his name was Auguste, and that’s it, you know. Given away probably at birth, you know?
Annie: That’s really tragic.
Elyse: It’s really tragic.
Annie: … because he didn’t recognize the child he had with his live-in wife.
Elyse: Right. Exactly.
Annie: The common law wife. So I can imagine the sort of… It might not have been her idea at all to separate from this child.
Elyse: I would say that as brilliant and talented a sculptress as she was, it… He basically helped destroy who she was by his attitude, you know.
Annie: Well, he ruled her life.
Elyse: He ruled her life.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: Then it was her mother who takes over, basically. So [00:19:00] during this 10 years, they even had three or four summers that they spent together in a castle, a chateau, that was in the Loire Valley. This live-in that he had, I mean, she basically had nothing to say about whatever Auguste Rodin did. I mean, this was just, you know, it was like she was there for doing the, who knows, the housekeeping, who knows.
Annie: Sure. Uh, well, you know, it’s handy dandy for a guy back then, even today, to have someone who will take care of the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the whatever, whatever.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: The children, you know?
Elyse: It really is… you know. I have a quote that I just put into the show notes where it’s actually taken out of one of his diaries where he says… And he, to the public, he called her Mademoiselle Claudel. That was, you know, how he addressed her.
He said, “She has become a most extraordinary sculptress and artist, and I consult her about everything.”
Annie: Right.
Elyse: Okay.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Elyse: So for 10 years, from 1882, [00:20:00] when she’s 18, till 1892, when she’s 28, they live this, what really apparently is a passion, okay?
Breakup And Independence
Elyse: And they spend some summers together, and she has these moments when she disappears for several months at a time, sometimes going off to England, and then when she is 28, he breaks off with her.
Annie: Mm-hmm. Probably because he met somebody else who was…
Elyse: Well, there was a new young assistant coming into the workshop, and a young woman that wound up being his next assistant mistress for five, six years. How this breakup worked, it is really impossible to know. She already still had her own private studio, and so when they separated, he gave recommendations, and he helped try and get her to sell her work. And she went to live and work in the studio. But all this time, you can imagine, she has this [00:21:00] mother who’s in the background, who is ashamed of her, who cannot accept the life that she has been living, who obviously will have nothing to do with the decadent style of life of this child, and meanwhile, she’s bringing up these two others, the second, the sister who gets married and lives this very conformist life, and the brother who becomes this intellectual, and he goes on to be a writer.
Annie: A very right-wing…
Elyse: A very right-wing, very conservative writer.
Annie: Yeah, because he’s very famous for his very right-wing views.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: And he’s very… And he becomes, even though it’s a Catholic family, when he’s a young man, he has this epiphany and becomes a traditionalist Catholic, so he becomes archly conservative even more.
Annie: Anti-Semitic, by the way.
Elyse: And very… And, well, she was too, Madam- unfortunately, but…
Annie: Ah, okay.
Elyse: Yeah. I don’t think she, I don’t think the world of politics was a world that really interested her particularly. She was just interested in her art. [00:22:00] But apparently, that part of the family influence rubbed off on her, too. I mean-
Annie: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse: You know, that’s what it was.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: So she goes to live in her studio, and then she moves to a studio on Île Saint-Louis, on the Quai Voltaire on Île Saint-Louis.
Annie: Okay, yeah.
Elyse: And you can actually walk by it now and see the plaque. That is where she actually had her studio. And what happens is that she continues to work as a sculptress, but she doesn’t have a lot of money, and her family refuses to give her money. And even though her father is still alive, her mother clearly dominates because her mother refuses to help her, completely.
Annie: So this is crazy, because she had a mother who was somewhat dominating, but she herself didn’t, she was very submissive to Rodin and to everybody else.
Elyse: The way I see it is that she was, number one, her life was her work. Her passion and her life was being a [00:23:00] sculptress, was being an artist, and she was clearly a person who lived her passions, and her passion was, in fact, secondary passion, was Rodin. She fell in love with him. He was mesmerizing. He was somebody, apparently, who could seduce anybody. I mean, he had that kind of a personality.
She lived all of this to the fullest. But, one of the reasons they broke up is because she did want to get married, and she kept saying to him, ” We have to get married. It’s now time for us to get married.” So there was a part of her that still held on to what would be just considered to be normal, kind of middle class values, and the pressure that she put on him, probably because also of having had several pregnancies, there’s evidence that she kept writing him notes about, you know, “We have to get married. We have to get married. This can’t continue unless we get married,” and that is eventually what broke them up, because [00:24:00] he did not want to get married. So she was stuck between a world of a bohemian free artist and the world of this conventional middle class life that was represented by her family.
And when Rodin broke up with her because he did not want to get married, she was left on her own.
Annie: Uh-huh.
Elyse: She was really left on her own.
Commissions And Misogyny
Elyse: Rodin worked hard for the next 10 years, between her being 28 and basically 38, to help get her commissions, she got a few commissions. She worked with this countess who gave her a lot of work for a few years, apparently, who had a lot of money.
She paid for several pieces, and nobody knows why, but all of a sudden, after about four or five years of patronage, this countess simply stopped wanting her to do any work. Nobody knows to this day exactly what happened between the two of them.
She had a few shows. In 1893, [00:25:00] she actually was shown in Chicago. She had work that actually went that far. She began doing a series of works that were based on Japanese art, which was very much the fashion at the time. He continued to have contact with her, and he actually d- which I think is obnoxious, he used molds that he had made of her face to help inspire him for some of his sculpture. You know, she was very beautiful.
Annie: The crazy thing is he had a lot of institutional commissions.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: He was paid to make big, beautiful institutional art, and that’s where you make the money.
Elyse: That’s right.
Annie: I don’t hear you helping her… Like, you didn’t help her get some of these commissions.
Elyse: He tried.
Annie: He tried, okay.
Elyse: He tried. Unfortunately, I think that for a lot of people, there was a certain just simple misogyny that the fact that Rodin tried to help her get big government commissions, they kept saying, “Yeah, she’s just a woman.” That basically it was [00:26:00] just, she’s just a woman. I mean, let’s face it, how many we know the names of two or three painters from this time period that were part of the impressionist and post-impressionist group, but who else do we know as a sculptress from this time? Nobody.
Annie: Nobody, yeah.
Elyse: Absolutely nobody. So he did try, and he apparently used his contacts. He sold some pieces for her. She actually did some small pieces in marble that gave her a huge sum of money in the 1890s. The countess who started working with her basically started by ordering pieces in 1897, but in 1905 she just stopped and nobody knows why. Nobody knows what happened, why this patronage simply stopped. So once the patronage ran out, she had no more money.
Annie: Right. Right.
Elyse: And her mother refused to help her.
Annie: Mm.
Elyse: Absolutely refused to help her. So here she is.
Annie: Was her father dead by then?
Elyse: No, he didn’t die until 1913. But for some [00:27:00] reason, he disappears out her life.
Annie: Yeah, he didn’t push it either.
Elyse: He didn’t push it either.
Annie: We blame the mom, but perhaps the dad wasn’t that-
Elyse: You know, she probably just was too much in terms of the scandals, of her behavior and things like that.
Isolation And Decline
Elyse: But what happened was, and this is where it gets muddy, living for her work and not having a lot of money, she started to become more and more what we would now say eccentric. And she started talking to herself a lot, and she started really becoming a kind of hermit living in her studio. So it’s hard to know at what point she started really having problems.
Annie: I mean, she might have had mental illness the whole time.
Elyse: It’s hard to know. It’s impossible to know. The financial difficulties and the fact that she was not being recognized artistically really helped destroy who she was, really.
And because her [00:28:00] family in no way supported her. I mean, her father would write to her, but her mother must have been just the most horrible tyrant. I mean, when you hear about what she did to her later on, it’s just absolutely unbearable.
And so her father really couldn’t do more than what he did, which is occasionally slip her a little bit of money, write her letters and things like that. And so little by little, she isolated herself.
Isolation a nd Misogyny
Elyse: And her brother went to see her. In 1909, he was already on his way being, to being this, this very important person, and he’d moved into this very conservative milieu that was even more conservative than one they’d grown up with. And he said, “She’s crazy.” This is him. It’s a quote from him. He wrote and he said, “My sister Camille is crazy. She’s destroying her studio. She lives in filth. She’s gotten old and ugly and fat,” which is a horrible thing to say, and she wasn’t old at all. “And she speaks with this strange mechanical voice.” So she was [00:29:00] starting to isolate herself and probably really going into a kind of paranoia.
Annie: Right. I mean, it sounds like mental illness. I’m no psychiatrist, but, like, it’s… The whole time she was putting up with things she wasn’t happy with.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: Because I don’t… I mean, back then, the status of a woman, the women didn’t have a choice. You either had money because you were rich to begin with, or you complied with societal norms and became a wife and got taken care of. Women were not expected to be productive and to… Other than in the family realm, obviously, which is a lot of work, but they were expected to be good wives and good child rearers and things like that. She didn’t have a choice, like she couldn’t have opened a bank account. She couldn’t have… She wasn’t allowed…
Elyse: No.
Annie: … to do a lot of the things she would’ve been allowed to do today, and we [00:30:00] don’t have parity by any means even to this day, but back then it was really hard.
Elyse: And she really lived for her sculpture. She really lived for that.
Annie: That’s hard for me to imagine because I don’t have a artistic aspiration of any sort. Like, I mean, I love this podcast, but that’s it, you know?
Elyse: No, but I, you know…
Annie: And I don’t live for the podcast, sorry folks.
Elyse: I can imagine what that’s like. I’m not like that, which is one of the reasons why I stopped painting basically, you know? But there are people who are like that, and so she went into this spiral, totally destructive spiral of rejection, of isolation, and the… certainly, things didn’t help.
Flood And Breakdown
Elyse: In 1910, her studio got flooded when the… she had the huge floods that, the Seine-
Annie: Well, she was right on the banks.
Elyse: She was right on the banks. Her studio got flooded.
Annie: If you walk my Île de la Cité tour, you’ll see the line, and it’s right on the island. I [00:31:00] think that part is on Île de la Cité. But it was, I mean, it’s always right next door, so it would have been the same height. You see the marks all over Paris of the 1910 flood. It was dramatic.
Elyse: It was dramatic. So here she is with hardly any money, and her studio gets flooded, and in 1912… How old is she in 1912? Let’s see. She was 28 in ’92, so she is… She’s 40. Thank you. She’s 40. She destroys everything in her studio.
Annie: Right.
Elyse: So she has really gone off, basically we could say she’s really-
Annie: Well, her brother was right. She was crazy, but if it was today, there’d be help for her.
Elyse: Exactly. Right.
Annie: And back then there wasn’t.
Elyse: There wasn’t, so she destroyed everything. She said that it was her enemies that were really causing all of her problems. She thought that there was [00:32:00] this group of people with Rodin, who was, of course, her obsession, who were out to get her, and she had absolutely no food.
Committed By Family
Elyse: And so when her brother went to see her, he said, he went back to see his mother, and he basically, he and his mother made a decision, and that decision was to put her away, literally, to put her somewhere.
And so in 1913, she is 48 years old. Her father dies. Her mother and her brother do not even tell her that he has died, so they don’t want her at the funeral. They’re ashamed of her. Can you imagine? Just can you imagine this? She finds out afterwards that her father has died, and that they’ve had the funeral, and that she has not been allowed to see the burial.
Annie: That’s terrible.
Elyse: And then her brother tells her mother that they need to put her away, and so her mother and her brother sign her into an asylum, and she’s taken away by [00:33:00] force.
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Elyse: She is diagnosed as being psychotic and paranoid.
Well, it is hard to know how much of this wouldn’t have happened if she had been treated differently, and certainly she would have had treatment because there are articles and papers that were written by the very psychiatrist that did see her, and of course, this is the beginning of psychiatry.
Annie: Yeah, they were not kind, like, but in those days, psychiatrists, psychiatry was not a gentle practice.
Elyse: No, but there’s actually two psychiatrists, if they were still… I don’t even know if at the point they were actually called that, who actually wrote and said, “She is treatable, she has calmed down, we can help her so that she does not have to stay.” This is the worst part, though. Her mother signed her in, first to an asylum in Paris, and she stipulated that she cannot have a lot of visitors, and she cannot have a lot of correspondence. [00:34:00] She purposely isolated her from the rest of the world. This is abominable.
Annie: Right, and it would not be allowed today, obviously.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: I mean, all of this has come a long way, thank God. Not far enough, probably, but I don’t think a situation like that would be possible today. Because today you’d have to put her under tutelle, so that’s what we call it. You know, like, I don’t know how to say that in English, when-
Elyse: You have to… I don’t even know how to say it in English, to be honest. Somebody else takes care of you.
Annie: Right, so a person loses the right to make decisions for themselves.
Elyse: Right.
Annie: And it’s usually a disinterested party-
Elyse: Right.
Annie: … that’s going to be in charge of the person’s affairs, any money that they have, any decisions, medical decisions they need to make, whatever. Yeah, it would be really hard back then to imagine what parents could do, especially influential people-
Elyse: Right.
Annie: … because Paul Rodin was definitely influential. I [00:35:00] mean, he’s famous, you know?
Elyse: He’s famous, and he did not want her to be associated with him. This is one of the reasons.
Asylum Years And Starvation
Elyse: So what happened is she was put away in an asylum in Saint-Denis in 1913, and in 1915, because of World War I, they needed the hospital space in the region around Paris, and so they sent her to an asylum in the Vaucluse, in a town called Montfavet.
Annie: Okay. Well, more sunshine.
Elyse: More sunshine, except that her mother stipulated that once she was locked in to this asylum, which apparently is where she had a couple of doctors who said that they could help her… This is what’s so terrible about it. Her mother wrote and stipulated that nobody could come and see her. This is horrible. And her brother said he did not want to have any association with her whatsoever. She stayed in this asylum in the [00:36:00] Vaucluse until she died in 1943. Her mother never, never went to see her, refused to have more than just two or three people contact her, and one of the people who actually went to see her was this friend, Jessie Lipscomb, the English woman, who actually went to see her twice, in 1920 and then in 1929. And then, of course, was so depressed by-
Annie: Horrified.
Elyse: … by the state that she was in, so she actually… And Camille, all she wanted to do, even once in the asylum, she wrote letters every single year, every year for the rest of her life, asking to be treated and to be let out, and she wanted material to work on her sculpture. It makes me want to cry, I have to say. This whole story makes me just want to cry.
She wrote endless numbers of letters. She asked for people to come and visit her. She did not even know that it was her mother that had forbade people [00:37:00] to actually… The fact that they even accepted that her mother could make this rule, it’s just absolutely horrifying, right?
Annie: This would not happen today. There’s no way they would let her mother dictate these things. No way.
Elyse: You know, the photo that I shared with you, she’s in her 60s, when you see what she looked like, she was absolutely gorgeous, you know, when she was this young woman. She was this brilliant, vibrant person. And she’s just this shell of a human being by the time she’s in her 60s. And she stayed in this asylum, and in 1943, she died. And the reason she died is she died of starvation.
Annie: What?
Elyse: They did not give food to the people in psychiatric asylums during World War II. And so instead of feeding the people that they decided were not worth keeping alive, she technically died of a form of malnutrition.
Annie: Right, and this happened a [00:38:00] lot, unfortunately.
Elyse: Yeah. The asylum she was in, over the few years of World War II, over 600 people died that way.
Annie: Jeez. In just that, that asylum?
Elyse: In that asylum alone. In that asylum alone, yeah.
Erased After Death
Elyse: And this is not the end of the story, but this is the end of her life. She had nobody come to see her burial. Her brother and her mother refused to acknowledge that she had died. Her body was put into a common grave with a whole bunch of other people.
Annie: Oh my.
Elyse: And when World War II ended and they took all of the bones out, they could have perhaps identified who she was, but her family at that time refused to acknowledge that she was there, and so we do not have any idea where the rest of her is. It went into some ossuary somewhere. And the only thing that happened was that, later on, post-death, in the 1950s and [00:39:00] ’60s, they acknowledged her existence by putting up a plaque that said that this is where she had, in fact, lived and died.
Annie: You know… I mean… I like to say nice things about France, but I have to say, there were some terrible things about France, as well. We still have a lot of really narrow-minded attitudes about certain things to this day, that are just sad.
Elyse: They’re very sad. But I want to add the last part because it’s the only little uplifting part of this whole story.
Annie: All right.
Elyse: Okay?
Annie: I’m ready.
Elyse: You’re ready? So Camille Claudel died in 1943, just about the age of 79, lost and locked away the second, basically the second half of her life. Her brother, Paul, got married, had children. The children had children.
Annie: Sure.
Great Niece Restores Legacy
Elyse: And in 1938, a young [00:40:00] woman was born named Reine-Marie Paris.
Annie: Okay.
Elyse: Who is the granddaughter of Paul Claudel.
Annie: Okay, yes.
Elyse: The bad brother. Okay?
Annie: Well, yeah.
Elyse: But I mean, you know, I-
Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Elyse: It turns out that as a teenager, she heard about, I don’t know how, but she heard about this great aunt that had been a sculptress, that had lived and died in this very mysterious kind of way that basically nobody in the family wanted to talk about. And this woman, Reine-Marie Paris, decided she was interested in studying art history.
Annie: Ah, nice.
Elyse: What happened was the more she studied art history, the more she became interested in this history and the story of her great-aunt, Camille Claudel. And so, in the [00:41:00] 1950s and in the 1960s, she decided that one of the things she was going to do was write the definitive catalog of the work of this great-aunt that she suddenly became passionate about.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: Now, Reine-Marie Paris is still alive.
Annie: Oh, nice.
Elyse: She’s 88 years old.
Annie: Okay, wonderful.
Elyse: She became this very important art historian, and she made her life’s work to make everybody appreciate the work of her great-aunt, Camille Claudel.
Annie: That’s wonderful.
Elyse: She was responsible not only for what is called a catalog, the term in French is called catalog raisonné, which means it’s the book that has the definitive list and image of every work done by a specific artist, okay?
Annie: Okay, I didn’t know this.
Elyse: Yeah, I have had a couple of these, and not for Camille Claudel, but I’ve had them for a couple of other artists, you know. And she published this in 1984, and she [00:42:00] did all this research. She went all the way around the world. She went to America. She went to Japan. She gathered up all this documentation. She took pictures of everything. She also did something else. She bought the rights to reproduce some of the sculpture.
Annie: Ah, okay. Yeah, because sculptures are reproduced all the time, right?
Elyse: Right. So she created an association for the promotion of her work. She is the person responsible for the Musée Camille Claudel, which is in Nogent-sur-Seine.
Annie: Oh, okay. That’s one I’d like to see.
Elyse: That was opened up in 2017.
Annie: All right. Nogent-sur-Seine is not that far from Paris.
Elyse: No, and she got into a fight with other members of her family. She was taken to court because she and her husband, who helped her in this work, this life’s work, obviously had some money. They not only bought up the rights to some of [00:43:00] these sculptures, but the part of the family sued them because she was making, having made bronze reproductions that were basically not the original. Well, well, a bronze by definition can be reproduced several times. I mean, there’s… No, no.
Annie: Sure. Well, and Rodin did that ad nauseam.
Elyse: Ad nauseam, right? So what happened was, members of the family took her to court, and she actually at one point lost, because they said, the court said she could not sell these pieces and claim them as originals. And then she took the family back to court again, and they finally decided that it was perfectly okay for her to sell these bronzes, as long as she didn’t just put on them the original first version of it, which was stupid because a bronze is a bronze is a bronze, you know? So you can make several copies of it, which is why now we do have copies of her work in museums, basically pretty much all over France and in the United [00:44:00] States in many, many major museums. It is really thanks to this woman, who it would be wonderful to meet, I would absolutely love to meet her.
She also wrote basically what is the definitive biography of her great-aunt. It must be very strange having grown up realizing that her grandfather, I have no idea how close she was to him, but having realized that it was because of him, that her great-aunt had this miserable second half of her life, basically, you know. It’s really hard.
But I find that it’s rather, I mean, uplifting is probably too strong a word, you know, but I find it wonderful that she had this great niece who rediscovered her existence after her death.
Well, actually, I mean, she was born actually before she died, but, you know, I mean, she didn’t know about it until much later, and who has actually made her come back to life, you know?
Annie: Yeah, there are some families that keep secrets and that have horrible things like that [00:45:00] to this day.
I don’t like that.
Movie And Rodin Reassessment
Annie: You mentioned the movie Camille Claudel before we started recording.
Elyse: Yes. The movie, so she helped to co-produce it. In fact, what happened was, she published this catalog raisonné in 1984, and Isabelle Adjani, I don’t know if it’s because she knew her work, because there is a room in the Rodin Museum, and that’s the other thing that’s very kind of ironic is that Rodin died in 1917. He died well before, you know, she did. But she was already locked up by 1917. But when he made his will, his testament, he stipulated that one of the rooms in the building that is his museum, which of course is a place where he had worked, be devoted to the sculpture of Camille Claudel. He stipulated that in his will.
Annie: So he was a jerk, but not a complete jerk.
Elyse: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, he was unfortunately a man of his time, and he was very macho and what that, you know.
Annie: And he was [00:46:00] taking advantage of women because that’s what people did. That’s what people did, you know? Yeah.
Elyse: So Isabelle Adjani, for those of you out there who don’t know her, she’s a great- very famous actress, of course, here in, in France. She found out about this life story of Camille Claudel, who is not unknown, of course, and she went to see Reine-Marie Paris, and she proposed… She actually made a deal with her so that they would co-produce the movie with her playing Camille Claudel.
Annie: And I have not seen this movie.
Elyse: Oh, I have.
Annie: Yeah.
Elyse: It came out in 1989. She won a César for it. The film won Best Film of the Year, actually. It’s an incredible movie. If you ever read an interview with Isabelle Adjani, she says it was the most exhausting role she ever played in her life because she totally immersed herself in this… this existence of this woman whose life was just absolutely tragic, you know? And [00:47:00] so the movie is really certainly accessible on streaming. And whatever the excessive drama that you see in the movie, it is largely accurate.
Annie: Yeah, unfortunately, it sounds like she had a pretty bad life. Tragic ending, and thankfully she was productive. I mean, I always enjoy seeing her pieces.
Her Sculptures And Influence
Annie: At the museum in Rouen, they have– Very often, I had the impression that she mostly made very small pieces.
Elyse: Yes. Yes.
Annie: But she also made some bigger ones.
Elyse: She made some bigger ones. Yes, she did. She did make some bigger ones.
But, in fact, she made… And there was a period of her life where she really worked in marble. And those are very small pieces. So it’s very-
Annie: And they are amazing. The one where… Oh, what is it called? Les Commérages or the… And you have all these women that are leaned into each other and, clearly repeating some bad, like commérages. How do you say that, commérages? It’s like gossip. The gossips.
Elyse: [00:48:00] Uh, gossip? Well, you say gossip, but commérages is even better because it’s kind of stronger as a word, I think, you know? It’s just-
Annie: Une commère is someone who repeats…
Elyse: Yeah, repeats gossip and rumors. Yeah. Yeah.
Annie: Yeah. But I think the piece is called The Gossips.
Elyse: It may be called The Gossips.
Annie: And I saw it at the Rodin Museum. When you have it in front of you and you can look at it from all angles, you can really see, it’s marble, but it’s like you hear them whispering to each other all these secrets and terrible things.
Elyse: She did a lot of pieces that are relatively, I would say, sensual, erotic is too strong a word.
But, you know, there are several pieces where you see a young woman and an older man, obviously based on her relationship with Rodin. You have two or three pieces where you have a couple embracing each other. This was really one of the major themes that she worked on. And then she did some very big pieces besides whatever she worked on with Rodin, you know.
Annie: But they were usually, like, lanky and [00:49:00] flowy.
Elyse: Yes.
Annie: You know, there are some artists that make these rotund figures, and I like those very much. But, Camille Claudel made, like… ethereal almost, like thin sorts of people.
Elyse: There’s a kind of dynamic movement in a lot of her work. Even the small pieces, you know? And you’re right.
And of course, as she evolved until unfortunately, she really stopped producing. But, you can see, especially when they’re cast in bronze, you can see the work where you see her, the almost like the fingerprints, you know, the clothing instead of just being smooth and art nouveau-ish, it just becomes kind of like you know, that kind of thing, you know?
Annie: So let’s end on this. Do you think Rodin got so much inspiration from her that he stole some ideas perhaps?
Elyse: It’s hard to say. Probably… No, I think for the big major pieces, you know, that he did because they were commission pieces, like the [00:50:00] Burghers of Calais or The Doors of Hell, those were pieces that were really commissions. What I do think, to answer your question in a sort of backwards way, I think his stylistic changes were influenced by her.
Annie: Mm-hmm.
Elyse: I think that she had a style that was extremely personal, and what a lot of art historians think now is that as his style evolved, except for the pieces like The Doors, which are, you know, very specifically made in terms of a theme. You can feel the work of the passion of their fingers and their hands on the style of it. It’s not smooth. It’s not super taken, you know. There’s that. I think that really– Because they worked on The Kiss together. I mean, they worked on these kinds of pieces. It must have been… the term in French is la fugue. You know? I don’t know how to even translate into English that word.
Annie: Meaning what?
Elyse: It means it’s a kind of energy.
Annie: Because there’s a word in [00:51:00] English, a fugue, but that’s a musical…
Elyse: That’s a musical term. No. This is a term that means it has to do with-
Annie: An escape. Fugue, like… Okay, okay.
Elyse: … an escape, you know, like an energy. It’s like you can almost feel the passion coming out of their hands working on these pieces together, and I think that is where she really influenced him in terms of the style of his work, you know?
Final Reflections And Farewell
Annie: A incredible story. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I learned a lot. I like her pieces. When I see Camille Claudel on a piece, I pay more attention to it, probably because there are so few women sculptors, right? Even though there were hundreds of them that, that learned the skill and doing stuff in marble, I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. that’s not a cast. You have to-
Elyse: You can’t make a mistake.
Annie: Yeah, no mistakes.
Elyse: No mistakes, no, no. And she worked tiny, tiny little details into everything, you know?
Annie: The skill it takes, I mean, you see [00:52:00] pieces like that in marble in many museums, and you know, you walk… When you… Like, this last couple of weeks, I’ve been to a lot of museums, and you walk past these pieces like it’s nothing, but this is years of work on some of these things.
Elyse: Oh, yeah.
Annie: Or months at least, and a very intense commitment from the artist to produce this thing, whether it’s a painting or a sculpture even more, I think.
It takes longer on average to make a sculpture than to make a painting, right?
Elyse: Well, in the old days, it did. Let’s put it that way.
Annie: Right. Right.
Elyse: I mean, sculpture today is very different because a lot of it is made using machines, you know? But I would say that certainly, working on a piece like one of Camille’s pieces or one of even Rodin’s pieces, certainly that would’ve taken a lot longer time than doing a painting.
Yeah.
Annie: Incredible. Thank you so much, Elyse. That was wonderful.
Elyse: Thank you, Annie.
Annie: Merci. Au revoir.
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[00:53:00]
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[00:54:00] [00:55:00]
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Episode PageCategories: French Culture, French History