Free The Kiss by Joan Lingard Page A

the long pale hair streaming behind her, were the Pied Piper. The Muse, sculpted as a memorial to Whistler, stood above them, armless, head bowed, mouth slightly open, her right foot lifted onto a high rock. Rodin had intended to do the arms at some point but had never got round to it. Cormac explained that Rodin often put together limbs and bits and pieces of bodies afterwards. In the museum out at Meudon one could see rows of casts for arms and legs and hands.
    ‘Gwen John was the model,’ said Clarinda, her eyes fixed on the downturned face.
    ‘Camille Claudel was his most important model,’ put in Cormac. It seemed necessary to get things into perspective.
    ‘Didn’t she go off her head?’ said Robbie. ‘Camille? Maybe all his models did.’
    ‘The statues she posed for are the most erotic and sensuous,’ said Cormac.
    It was so much easier here in Paris to speak of sensuality and eroticism than back in Edinburgh within the constraints of the classroom where the pupils tended to giggle or catcall. Here they were determined to show they were fully fledged adults. Most of them had probably had some sexual experience, if statistics were to believed, and in this instance he was sure that they were. He had read somewhere that the average starting age for having sex in the UK was 15.3 years, whereas globally it was 15.9. These young people were not as he had been at sixteen and seventeen, gauche in his encounters with the opposite sex, and, apart from any experiences they had had themselves, they went regularly to the cinema and saw films marked 18.
    ‘If you look at Gwen’s face here or in her self-portrait,’ said Clarinda, ‘you would never imagine that she was so sensual and so passionate. Or so wild.’
    ‘I suppose she had it off with Rodin too, like all the others?’ said Robbie.
    Clarinda ignored him and continued to address Cormac. ‘She seems so demure, wouldn’t you say? Do you remember reading about how she sat on rocks at the edge of the sea on the Welsh coast and a huge wave came and swept her out to sea and then swept her back in again? She called it “delicious danger”.’ Clarinda lingered over the last two words. ‘I understand that.’
    ‘You do?’ He did remember something about Gwen John liking to swim naked and go far out to sea but did not recall her being swept off rocks. But then it was a long time since he had read about her life, and indeed had not given it much thought until now. ‘It can sometimes be a mistake to get too interested in the lives of artists,’ he cautioned. ‘Especially taking one particular aspect of them, for that can distort the person.’ Rachel had once accused him of caricaturing his aunts by dwelling on their oddities whereas much of the time they were douce women living quietly and minding their own business; he had responded that it was their peculiarities that made them interesting and brought them into relief. But aunts did not come into the same category as artists whom one did not know in a personal way. ‘Better to concentrate on the work, Clarinda,’ he went on. ‘That, after all, is what matters.’
    ‘But when Gwen was unhappy it affected her work!She had no energy, she couldn’t paint. If you were unhappy could you go on with your work?’
    ‘It could be a diversion from unhappiness.’ He was to find that this would not be so in his case.
     
    The exhibits in both the garden and the building inspired all of them, even those like Cathy and Sue who had probably come on the trip for the city of Paris itself more than its art. The students wandered around entranced by the sheer beauty of the sculptures, their energy and charged emotion. They circled round the larger pieces, such as The Burghers of Calais , in wonder, eager to see them fully and from all angles, going back to them again and again. They squatted on the floor inside the high, spacious rooms and on the grass outside drawing busily in their sketch books. They kept remarking