You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett Page A

her studio only once or twice a month. Eventually, he even began sending assistants in his place.
    Rodin was busy then raising funds to meet the deadline to participate in the 1900 World’s Fair. The city had not invited him to officially show in the event, but would allow him to display his work on municipal land so long as he provided his own pavilion.
    Up to that point, the closest Rodin had come to exhibiting in the World’s Fair was in sculpting the details on works shown by other artists. Even though the pavilion would cost him eighty thousand francs, it was an opportunity he could not pass up. The population of Paris then was not quite three million; during the World’s Fair, the city would host fifty million people. Rodin would be the only artist there with a pavilion all his own.
    He asked the city to use the Place de l’Alma, a triangular patch of land at the well-trafficked intersection of Cour-la-Reine and Avenue Montaigne. The city council was divided in its opinion on Rodin and did not immediately approve the request. It took a sympathetic politician who moonlighted as a poet to nudge the proposal through. Thesculptor knew how lucky he was: “If Paris had been Italy in the time of the Borgias I should have been poisoned,” he said.
    Determined not to squander his good fortune, Rodin drained his savings and borrowed money from three bankers to build a six-sided, Louis XVI–style pavilion with a steel frame and stucco walls. The leaves of the trees on the site tinted the light streaming through the tall, arched windows, giving the pavilion the lush, fertile feel of a greenhouse. For Rodin, sculpture was meant to be seen outdoors, where lighting was always at its best.
    The project consumed all of the artist’s time and, in April, just a few months after opening his academy, he closed it for good. Disappointed, Westhoff packed her things to return to Germany. But she could not leave before witnessing the extravaganza the World’s Fair was about to unleash on the city. She and Becker had been peeking through the construction fences for months as workers built walls for the new exhibition halls. The city had spent four years preparing to hold court before the entire world and prove that Paris was queen of the Belle Époque, ready to reign well into the twentieth century.
    ALMOST AS SOON AS Parisians turned their calendars from 1899 to 1900, the hopelessness and anxiety that had defined the city at the fin de siècle gave way to a new millennial optimism. Where once people feared machine-powered industry, the possibilities of technology now excited them. Manufacturing elicited new consumerist desires, while intriguing advances in neurology and psychology quelled the fear of hysteria.
    Paris hosted the fourth edition of the International Congress of Psychology that year at the World’s Fair. The research presented there revealed a broader cultural embrace of the unknown. Furious debates broke out over papers on the topics of hypnosis, ESP and parapsychology. A few months earlier, Freud had published his Interpretation of Dreams , wherein he declared dreams the “royal road” to the unconscious. Some researchers considered these mysteries to be fascinating areas of inquiry; others thought they were an embarassment to the profession.

    The Eiffel Tower lit up during the Exposition Universelle of 1900 .
    The World’s Fair was a mass-market utopia, “a phantasmagoria that people enter in order to be amused,” as Walter Benjamin later wrote. When the carriages rolled in on opening day, the ladies in cantilevered hats and men with walking sticks expected to be astonished by the latest innovation in motion pictures, motorcars, colonial exotica, art and electricity. French engineers unveiled the Métro subway and its Art Nouveau stations, connecting what had been a patchwork of hamlets into an integrated city. On either side of the Seine rose a replica town