All, in one place. The waltz a dance made for dizziness fought down, but tasted. Claudel’s sculpture of it a centrifuge, spinning her heart down to sediment, and a final sentence. Not much travel in a mechanism made to high tolerances; she would have gone anywhere with Rodin, ready as she was with her suitcase full of clay. Luggage her only ballast, and that soon lost. Leader gone to stop a hole against the wind. How to make a thing that will make love stay? The only path: to know it from atom to dust clouds draping a star.

Author’s Notes:

1. The wonderful Bruno Nuytten film Camille Claudel (1988) opens with a scene in which Claudel is gathering clay from a river bank, which she carries away in a suitcase. Nuytten may have found reference to this activity in one of the various biographical works regarding Claudel; but what better metaphor could be found for the tragic course of her life than—a suitcase full of clay.

2. My sixth sentence [“Leader gone to stop a hole against the wind”] alludes to these lines in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (Act 5, Scene 1).

La Valse (The Waltz) or Les Valseurs (The Waltz Dancers)

Various versions of this bronze sculpture by Camille Claudel were made
between 1889 and 1905; versions are held by the Musée Rodin in Paris
and by the Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent-sur-Seine.

Camille Claudel

(1864-1943) was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She was a student, lover and muse, and longtime associate of French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Although she died in relative obscurity and in a mental institution to which she had been involuntarily committed by her family, she later gained recognition for the originality and quality of her work.

Her sculptures are held in the collections of the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. About half of her existing artworks are now on display at the Musée Camille Claudel, which opened in 2017 in the town where she lived as a teen, Nogent-sur-Seine, about 60 miles southeast of Paris.

Daryl Scroggins

has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas, and the Writer’s Garret, in Dallas. He now lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), Winter Investments: Stories (Trilobite Press), and Prairie Shapes: A Flash Novel (winner of the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest). His poems, short stories, and creative nonfictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, including Blink Ink, Cutbank, Eastern Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Star 82 Review, and Third Wednesday, among others.