The splendid Hôtel Biron, with its spacious vestibule, broad staircase, and patrician salons lined with boiseries, retains much of its 18th-century ambience and makes a brilliant frame for the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rodin took rooms in the building in 1908, when it was a temporary crash pad for artists such as Jean Cocteau and Isadora Duncan. When the state claimed the hôtel a few years later, Rodin offered his collections to the government if they would turn the house into a museum of his work. The state was initially wary, as Rodin's work was a hot button at the time, but the museum opened in 1919.

Rodin's funeral, at the height of World War I, drew the largest nonmilitary crowd of the time (26,000); while alive, however, he was stalked by controversy. His career took off in 1876 with L'Age d'Airain (The Bronze Age), inspired by a pilgrimage to Italy and the sculptures of Michelangelo. Because the work was so realistic, some critics accused Rodin of having stuck a live boy in plaster, while others blasted him for what was seen as a sloppy sculpting and casting technique. His seeming messiness, though, was intentional; Rodin refused to smooth out his work, leaving fingerprints along with marks from tools and rags (used to keep the clay moist), because he wanted his sculptures to reflect the artistic process of creation.

Rodin's most celebrated work is Le Penseur (The Thinker, circa 1880), the muscular man caught in a moment of deep thought and flex. The version here in the garden is the original -- the city of Paris, its intended owner, refused to accept it. Before installing the bronze statue on the steps of the Panthéon, Rodin set up a full-scale plaster cast. Its physicality horrified the public; crowds gathered around the statue, debates ensued, and Rodin was ridiculed in the press. Around the same time, Rodin was commissioned to create the doors for the newly proposed Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts). He set out to sculpt a pair of monumental bronze doors in the tradition of Italian Renaissance churches, calling his proposal La Porte de l'Enfer (The Gate of Hell). The Gate, a visual representation of stories from Dante's Divine Comedy, became his obsession: he spent the last 37 years of his life working on it and it now stands in the garden opposite The Thinker. The absorbed lovers of The Kiss were originally designed for these doors, but they became an independent sculpture (shown indoors).

The gardens of the Musée Rodin are nearly as much a work of art as the sculptures. The powerful Balzac, portrayed in his dressing gown and subject of yet another scandal, and figures from the mythic Burghers of Calais take their places among evergreens, ferns, allées of trees, and, most notably, rosebushes (more than 2,000 of them, representing 100 varieties). The museum has some information in English. COST: EUR5; Sun. EUR3; gardens only, EUR1. Métro: Varenne.