Camille Claudel

My poem/play dedicated to 19th century sculptor Camille Claudel. I first performed it at the Pitshanger Poets reading, during the My Muse Festival at Questors Theatre, London:

Oh Camille!

What happened to your art, Camille? Why

do you no longer craft beautiful things?

I asked her this when I visited her in the asylum. It’s

a psychiatric asylum, mercifully we do not use such words anymore.

Camille has been here for decades, since 1913 in fact.

We are sitting in the garden.

You see, she replies to me, sad things happen to me every few decades, to be exact. It’s a curse!

What do you mean, I ask.

At age 19, I became Rodin’s collaborator and model, but never once his equal.

You mean the celebrated yet imperious sculptor August Rodin?

Three decades later, when I was 49, I was committed by my brother Paul

to this asylum. A curse! And now that I am 69, I have been locked up in this place for the past two decades. Yet another curse!

Your brother? Do you mean the celebrated yet antisemitic poet and dramatist Paul Claudel?

She does not answer; she will not answer.

But, Camille, you left behind an unrivalled body of work? I say.

What I left behind is perishable... clay, marble, bronze.

And your best memories about Rodin?

None of them is precious. When we met, I was 19 and Rodin was 42. He, the unsurpassed sculptor, and I, a mere promise.

But you became his muse...

You mean his spurned lover. He used me both as an artist and as a woman.

But was it not Rodin who said: “I showed her where to find gold, but the gold she found belonged to her”? What did you do with the gold you found, Camille?

No one showed me where the gold was. Ultimately, there’s little you can do with gold when you are locked up in an institution for so long.

And by gold you mean...?

Oh, art, what else? Art is the only gold worth pursuing.

But your Girl with a Sheaf inspired Rodin’s celebrated sculpture of Galatea.

Or did he blatantly copy my work?

And you also contributed to Rodin’s The Gates of Hell.

Were those gates left open so that I would enter? Yes, this asylum where I have been locked up is hell itself.

And your best works, Camille?

The bust of my treacherous brother Paul when he was an adolescent, portrayed as a young Roman citizen.

Well, I say, my favourite is your sculpture The Waltz, love at its most obsessive.

Oh, yes, I remember that swaying couple, who so passionately danced. What a shame that I cannot feel love anymore!

And when I said: “Camille, worse than not feeling love is that you cannot sculpt again”, she walked back into the dark, melancholy building, alongside all those other other inmates. It was retreat time.

And on my part, I remained in the garden until sunset, watching the spring winds play with the trees and the shrubs and the flowers. That same evening Camille died, aged 69.

Can nothing then bring her back, not even the gold of her art?

©isabeldelrio2026