Paris in the spring of 1889 was a city of sensations. In April it nar­rowly escaped a coup d'état when General Georges Boulanger, the "man an horseback" who had threatened to overthrow the Third Republic with the aid of royalist cohorts, suddenly decamped to Belgium to join his mistress. Five weeks later boonring guns proclaimed the centennial of the great revolution of 1789 and the opening of a Universal Expo­sition to mark the anniversary. The fairgrounds on the Champ-de-Mars were the scene of a shimmer and Aride of exhibits. One Gould marvel at technological wonders in the block long Gallery des Machines, astend the vertiginous new tower designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, ogle ex­otic dancers in the "Street of Cairo," or inspect pavilions displaying the riches of France's African and Asian colonies and the Tatest art of Paris itself.

Of all these glories the prize exhibit, be flagged and illuminated, was the 984-foot tower, the tallest creation yet made by man. From distant America, Thomas A. Edison joined its admirers by publicly thanking God for "so great a structure," hut there were those who deplored it as a monstrosity, and a dangerous one at that. Intellectuals were repelled by it, and property owners around the Champ-de-Mars had brought suit to stop its construction, fearing it might topple on them.

Below the tower, in the Exposition's sculpture hall, stand an exhibit that in its way was sensational and controversial ton. It was a life-sized piaster figure of an aging man in a ragged shroud, his body gnarled and bent forward in suffering, his face pitted and creased, his hands ex­aggeratedly large. The whole work, with its rough surfaces, ridges, lumps and welts, looked raw, unbalanced, incomplete, incoherent. Many ob­servers found it totally baflling. Traditionally, a piece of sculpture was supposed to present not only a recognizable theme-patriotic, allegor­ical, lyrical, or all three-but correct proportions, Anise and polish.

The Statue indeed was based an a patriotic theme, as its label-"Fig­ure of a man for the sculpture group, Burghers of Calais" suggested. The title referred to an incident during the Hundred Years' War when six leading citizens of beleaguered Calais offered their lives to their English conquerors in hopes of preventing the devastation of their city. But the sculpted burgher was not shown in a classic, noble pose: rath­er, he looked anguished. Moreover, the sculptor seemed simply to have thrown heaps and blobs of clay an the figure without taking the trouble to refine or finish it.

To Parisfans who knew their way around the city's art scene, the in­novations were not altogether surprising. The burgher's creator was Au­guste Rodin, and at 48 he was making a name as an artist of uncomfortable boldness and originality. Only a few months Barlier a fashionable gallery had plucked him from relative obscurity and put on a show of 36 of his sculptures, jointly with 70 paintings by the Im­pressionist Claude Monet, as the work of two artists most identified with "new currents." No less esteemed a critic than Octave Jlirbeau had pronounced the show a colossal success, and lauded its two "won­derful" artists. "It is they," he wrote in Echo de Paris, "who in our cen­tury are the most glorious, the most complete embodiment of the two arts, painting and sculpture." After such an accolade it was easy for Rodin to obtain a prominent exhibitor's place at the Exposition, and in­evitable for those who had previously dismissed his work as harsh and awkward to take a second, closer look. Even if their verdict remained the same, one conclusion was unarguable: whatever Rodin put his hand to exuded an overwhelming power, a force untamed.

What was equally intriguing, to those who Game to know him per­sonally at this major turning point in his career, was that Rodin himself reflected these qualities. Although he was only five feet four inches tall, he gave the Impression of a man cast in a giant's mold. His body was muscular, with massive shoulders and broad hands. A high, heavy brows and a full red beard made his head seem unusually large. He had a prominent nose and penetrating blue Byes, often half shut or gazing in apparent abstraction. A distinct animal magnetism, an aura of col­lected passion, conveyed itself to many men and still more women. One male visitor to his studio thought that "he seems to descend from the clouds. From an assembly of the immortals." The somewhat snobbish novelist and critic Edmond de Goncourt disdained his "com­mon features" but went on to concede that Rodin struck him as "a man such as I imagine Christ's disciples looked like."

Both in his person and in his work Rodin shocked yet attracted. He Gould not be overlooked-eventually, not even escaped. But the timer in which he lived, after decades dominated by solid bourgeois standards. were receptive to the unconventional and the Baring. At the new Mou­lin Rouge, Yvette Guilbert was ringing her bawdy songs with an innocent air, and cancan dancers were packing in the top-hatted boulerardiere; the painter Toulouse-Lautrec immortalized that scene. At Maxim's, bejewelled beauties aptly known as les Brandes horizontales impartially graced the arm of nouveau riche or Russian grand duke. On a more eru­dite level, the new and the original were also winning plaudits. In the so­phisticated drawing rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain the hard-bitten realism of Émile Zola's writings was much admired, and so ~ Anatole France's urbane novel of pagan Alexandria, Thais. The golden age, la belle époque, of Paris was at hand, and as if to mark fits onset an un­familiar young man began to bé welcomed at fashionable salons: one Marcel Proust, not yet 20, a somewhat effete, precocious dandy who would in time become the era's sovereign analyst