A Balzac (Rodin, monument to Balzac)

By Miguel Herrera

I never met him in person.
I was only 10 years old when he died.
I read everything he wrote.
I visited the city of his youth
and spoke to everyone who could remember him in those years.
He was for me, the body of the republic, and I was amazed to learn
that in person
he was small, fat, a little ugly, but in my mind,
he was the creator of the nation,
a trunk, a rock, a stone stele, a force of nature
able to understand a country in turmoil
and hold it together.

He was an overflowing source of new ideas.
I wanted to give substance to this notion,
to model this image, to model it in clay,
not only a vulgar portrait, following the standards of classical portraiture,
but a new
(This is what he did in his writings,)
way of expressing the inner person
beyond simple reproduction, or a superficial resemblance,
which any artist could have done.
They did not like it. They did not understand.
They just wanted the portrait of the person,
well-dressed, elegant, with straight combed hair,
and even with a bow tie to show his importance.
They rejected my idea, all my researches.
I had made hundreds of drawings,
about 40 attempts in clay, at different positions.
But they did not understand,
it was too new for them.

First, I make the head.
Strong, prudish, arrogant
with leonine hair, blowing in the breeze.
A strong neck, almost like a bull´s,
the eyebrows unkempt,
the eyes deep in their orbits,
a shaggy mustache.
An imposing figure.
It was, it is, a strong image of him.

His head came to me easily. It was made almost on its own.
It had been following me for too long.
But the body, the body was the problem. The real problem.
I made almost 40 versions of it. Naked, with a big belly.
Thin, almost skeletal legs,
I studied how to make it solemn, noble,
like a Greek sculpture or a Roman senator.
Nothing worked.
He continued to look weak, his legs thin, his belly protruding,
impossible to hide under a normal suit.

To continue working with clay, it is necessary to wet it
and cover it, every night
under a bag, to prevent it from drying.

And suddenly I saw it. Complete. Done. Finished.
He was there,
as in my dreams, under the bluish silver light of the moon.
I saw my idea becoming a reality.
I took off the humid cloth
and dressed him with my bathrobe,
as an archaic, primitive priest's coat.
Nobody had thought before about using something real to complete a sculpture.
This was the first time.
And I stayed there in the light of the evening, alone with my creation:

I had made the first modern sculpture.

Mine was a solitary path.
a walk on a high rope, without a net,
a walk on the edge
faced with defeat, without no one to help me.
They couldn't see it.
they did not have the vision
and they rejected my creation.

Right now, he is with me,
in my country house, in the middle of nowhere.
Far away from Paris, far away from all the gossips.

One day they will understand.