Rodin's School

Rodin’s School is a small, licensed country school whose ordinary educational structure conceals Rodin’s exploitation of the children placed in his care. It admits fourteen girls and fourteen boys, teaches pupils from age twelve until they turn sixteen, and gives Rodin access to them through a schedule of lessons and punishments. Rosalie explains the school’s real purpose to Therese, who then witnesses Rodin use an invented disciplinary pretext against a pupil. The institution’s central contradiction is that the authority and routine of schooling, ostensibly meant to educate and protect, instead help Rodin exert control over vulnerable students.

Establishment and Organization

Rodin holds a charter to operate the school, obtained during his wife’s lifetime; the authorities have not revoked it since her death. The school is selective as well as small: its roster consists of fourteen girls and fourteen boys, none younger than twelve, and pupils are sent away when they reach sixteen. Rodin rejects children he considers physically unsuitable, offering ingenious-sounding justifications. As a result, the school’s places are either left unfilled or occupied by pupils chosen for their appearance.

The children do not board or take meals at the school. They attend twice daily, from seven to eleven in the morning and from four to eight in the afternoon. When Therese first arrives, classes are suspended for the holidays; the pupils return as she recovers. That regular timetable gives the establishment the visible shape of a conventional school while arranging the children’s repeated presence under Rodin’s supervision.

Lessons and Staff

Rodin teaches the boys himself. His governess is responsible for the girls, whom he visits after finishing his own lessons. The curriculum includes writing, arithmetic, some history, drawing, and music. Rodin employs no other master. The range of subjects and the division of teaching duties lend the school an appearance of purposeful instruction, but they also place Rodin in direct authority over the boys and give him access to the girls through the governess’s classes.

Rodin’s medical work provides another part of the establishment’s public identity. Rosalie tells Therese that he pursues medicine because he enjoys it and conducts investigations; she describes him as a celebrated physician and author of authoritative works. He had worked in Paris for twenty years before retiring to the country. The actual surgeon at Saint-Marcel is Rombeau, whom Rodin has taken under his tutelage and with whom he collaborates on experiments. According to Rosalie, however, Rodin’s reason for running a school is not financial necessity or a commitment to teaching: it is libertinage, and the pupils’ dependence allows him to exploit them.

Discipline and Abuse of Authority

The school’s disciplinary practices expose the distance between its educational appearance and its actual use. Rosalie tells Therese that Rodin has three days each week on which he punishes pupils who have misbehaved, and invites her to watch what happens. From a closet adjoining the room where Rodin conducts the punishment, the two observe through gaps between poorly joined boards. The partition lets Therese see the activity while keeping the observation concealed.

Rodin brings in Julie, a fourteen-year-old pupil, and accuses her of passing a note to a boy as she entered the classroom. Julie denies the charge. Rosalie quietly tells Therese that the alleged offenses are trivial pretexts and that Rodin treats Julie harshly because she resists him. In this scene, the school’s disciplinary authority is not shown as a neutral response to misconduct: Rodin supplies the accusation himself, while the pupil’s protest cannot prevent him from proceeding. The school’s routine of correction gives his abuse an institutional cover.

Rosalie and Therese’s Discovery

Therese has wondered why Rodin pursues both medicine and teaching when, as Rosalie explains, he could live comfortably without either profession. Rosalie’s confidences answer that question and transform the school from a puzzling refuge into a place of danger. She trusts Therese as a well-brought-up girl who will keep the secret, then leads her to the concealed viewing place so that Therese can see Rodin’s conduct for herself.

This revelation is especially consequential because Therese has arrived at Rodin’s home as someone who has already been driven by poverty to seek shelter and employment. Her own account of her earlier vulnerability includes an encounter with Dubourg, who tells her that a poor girl’s virtue is of no value to wealthy men and urges her to make herself useful to them. The school reproduces that wider pattern in a new form: young people’s dependence on adults and lack of power make the language of service, education, and discipline available for exploitation. Rosalie’s explanation allows Therese to recognize that the respectable structure of Rodin’s establishment does not protect its pupils.

Narrative Significance

Rodin’s School is one episode in Therese’s repeated movement through institutions and households that promise help while placing her at the mercy of those who control resources. The pupils’ fixed ages, numbered enrollment, daily hours, and scheduled punishments give the school an orderly surface; Rosalie’s account reveals the exploitation organized beneath it. The contrast is not between education and disorder, but between the school’s public routines and the private purpose those routines serve.

The school also makes poverty and dependence part of the machinery of abuse. Elsewhere, Therese learns that powerful exploiters seek out people whose need to survive leaves them with few alternatives, and that economic hardship can enlarge the supply of victims available to them. At Rodin’s establishment, the pupils’ dependence is likewise central to his power. Its license and lessons do not cancel that imbalance; they help make the abuse harder to see until Rosalie names it and Therese witnesses the disciplinary scene.