Rodin was involved with many women over the course of his life, some of whom transformed it forever. The first woman he knew was his mother, Marie Cheffer Rodin, who stayed home as a housewife and raised him in the working-class district of Paris in which they lived, Mouffetard. Rodin greatly admired his mother, as he did his older sister, Maria, who was energetic and progressive and his first significant role model. She wanted to open a business but instead decided to join a convent, as many intelligent young women did at the time. Through this decision she influenced much of the religious symbolism present in Rodin’s work. When she died in 1862, two years after taking the veil, Rodin converted and entered the order of the Father of the Most Holy Sacrament. However, with the encouragement of Pierre-Julien Eymard, the order’s head, Rodin decided to leave in order to pursue his artistic talents (Lampert 1, Judrin, “Rodin’s Drawings” 14).
A few years later he began what would become a more than fifty-year relationship with Rose Beuret (right), a seamstress who modeled for Rodin, acted as his housekeeper and studio assistant, and eventually mothered his son, Auguste Beuret (Schmoll 33). As the years went on Rose took control of the steadily increasing household, allowing Rodin to revel in the artistic world of which she knew she could never be a part. In 1882, Rodin began to teach a small group of female students as a personal favor to his artist friend Boucher (Butler 180). Among them was a brilliantly talented young woman of twenty-four, Camille Claudel (below, left and right), with whom Rodin would carry on a stormy, sixteen-year affair that would utterly transform both their lives.
Rodin fell in love with Claudel almost at first sight. Her extraordinarily self-taught talent captivated him; he was mesmerized by her keen self-discipline, pride, and independence. It is a small wonder, Ruth Bulter notes, “that he was swept away by this new Maria, whose vocation was not the religious life but sculpture. As for Rose, her place in Rodin’s life was swiftly becoming that of a desexualized mother maintaining the hearth” (Butler 187).
Over the next decade and a half, Rodin and Claudel hung together in the tenuous balance between their fiery feelings for each other and the impossibility of their relationship. Although Rodin never sculpted Claudel directly (except for a bust of her head), she is embodied in many of his sculptures from that period, including Dawn, France, St. George, and Thought (Butler 193). But if we cannot infer Rodin’s feelings from his artwork, they are more than clear in his letters. “‘Have pity, mean girl,’” Rodin wrote to Claudel. 
“‘I can’t go on. I can’t go another day with seeing you. Atrocious madness, it’s the end, I won’t be able to work anymore. Malevolent goddess, and yet I love you furiously …’” (Rodin qtd. Butler 184). The two drove each other mad, unable to reconcile their artistic and personal needs.
In the words of Champigneulle, “Rodin not only admired Camille. He loved her as he had never loved before and would never love again” (Champigneulle 167). Likely the opposite case was also true. Nevertheless, in 1898 Claudel left Rodin for good, living in self-exile in her Ile Saint-Louis apartment for the next fifteen years until her family, concerned about her mental state, had her interned in an asylum. The following year she was transferred to a “home” at Montdevergues, and remained there until her death (Ward-Jackson 1).
Rodin, meanwhile, continued to make art, moving in and out of several causal relationships with models and other women in his circles. He finally married Rose Beuret in February 1917, two weeks before her death and nine months before his own. Despite their half-century relationship, it was Camille Claudel who taught Rodin the true meaning of passion. It is not unlikely that the wild and feverous expressions of love evident in Rodin’s later work were inspired by Claudel - unable to satisfy his heart’s yearnings in real life, Rodin necessarily turned to his life’s other passion: art.
top: Auguste Rodin. Photograph. “Auguste Rodin.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Janurary 2006. http://encarta.msn.com
right, above: Rose Beuret. Photograph. “Rodin’s Photographs.” January 2006. http://user.chollian.net/~rodin87/photograph.html
left: Camille Claudel. Photograph. “Camille Claudel.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. January 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
right, below: Camille Claudel Working in Rodin’s Studio. c. 1888. Musée Rodin, Paris. Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel. By J.A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1994. Frontispiece.