Rodin kept his Balzac monument after the Society of Men of Letters rejected it

Ugliness, a shapeless mass, a monster: this is how the patrons described Auguste Rodin's monument to Balzac. The statue at the intersection of the boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse still provokes controversy today. After a scandal that all France followed, Rodin kept the sculpture for himself and returned the advance, since the committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres refused to recognise in it a statue of Balzac. Rodin's admirers declared their readiness to buy the work, the townspeople joked about the frightening silhouette, comparing it to plaster seals and penguins, and Rodin sent Balzac, over whom he had laboured for more than two years, off to his studio, and only 40 years later would the figure at last rise above the streets of Paris.