Monument to Balzac

The bronze figure stands wrapped in a heavy, oversized monk's robe, with a massive, furrowed brow gazing outward. Auguste Rodin spent seven years obsessed with this tribute to the novelist Honoré de Balzac. When the literary society finally unveiled the statue in eighteen ninety-eight, they rejected it. Critics called the shape a sack of flour and a deformed monster. Rodin moved the sculpture to his garden in Meudon, where it remained unseen by the public for another forty-one years.