With Camille Claudel, one enters a sultry world! Camille, the sister of Paul Claudel, is a liberated woman at the end of the 19th century. She wants to be a sculptor, which she indeed managed to accomplish brilliantly.
However, her life is a drama; misunderstood or too ahead of her time, she was with Rodin both her teacher, her master, and her lover—a rebellious and defiant student and mistress.
Then there’s Debussy, her brother, her father who doesn’t know how to handle this daughter who rejects the hypocritical norms of late 19th-century society. Camille, like her brother Paul, becomes famous and recognized in a society where women are generally scorned. A feminist?
Not really; she simply wants to be herself, sculpt, and live. This is her tragedy, and she will pay dearly for it. How? You must read this book by Anne Delbée, who offers us an unusual biography, perhaps even the first, on this woman Camille Claudel who gave both her life and her freedom to sculpture. Her thirty-year confinement and her death in an asylum in 1943 left the matter unfinished. Thanks to Anne Delbée, Camille Claudel is somewhat rehabilitated to us.
Thierry Jan, writer
