Of course, because no one was with Rodin all those hours in the studio, watching page after page of contour drawings drift to the floor by his chair, because no one was there when he took out his watercolors and flicked his brush over hundreds of outlined figures, because no one was at his side as he cut the women out of his drawings and pieced them back together in a myriad of new compositional relationships, we will never truly understand the inner workings of Rodin’s mind as he toiled with pencils and brushes during the last twenty years of his life. However, using what we know of his artistic process at this time, we witness a striking and undeniable deterioration of eroticism from the late 1890s to the early years of World War I: the drawings begin sketchy, full of line, and relatively clearly defined, and dissolve through gradual phases of increasing fluidity until arriving at complete nebulosity, in which the forms of the women’s bodies flow together, unbounded, manifesting Rodin’s ultimate abstraction of the human form.
It is in through this devolution that the true implications of imposing such a chronology become clear. As time goes on, not only do the couples’ bodies melt together - the eroticism melts away. Whereas the early sketches were imbued with a potent and indisputable sensuality, the later watercolors and cutouts begin to lose this erotic element until, ultimately, no measure of eroticism exists in the drawings at all. Rodin’s seeming preoccupation with erotica has been subverted to his newfound focus: the abscence of line. Thus, we realize that Rodin’s ultimate preoccupation was with the artistic freedom drawing afforded him, and that feminine sexuality was simply the venue in which he chose to explore this freedom, not the other way around. Rodin says it himself: “Do you see these delightful shoulders? That is a line of perfect beauty … 
Look at this bosom: the wonderful swelling roundness has an almost unreal grace. Here is a different model. Consider the incomparably beautiful undulating line of the hips” (Rodin qtd. Judrin, “Rodin Watercolors” 21). In regarding his models, he sees the beauty of the lines, not the sensuality. We might question Bonnet’s assertion, then, that for Rodin, eroticism and art were models for each other. Perhaps in the beginning Rodin modeled his art on eroticism, but by the time of his death his drawings were modeled on nothing other than the most basic principles of art themselves - shape, line, form, color. Art had become “a model for art,” as it were, and sex was pushed to a backburner as just another aspect of the drawings - interesting, to be sure, even exciting, but not nearly as gripping for Rodin as the power of the pencil.
left, above: Rodin, Auguste. Three Women Embracing. Undated. Musée Rodin, Paris.
right, below: Rodin, Auguste. Bilitis. Undated. Musée Rodin, Paris.