The typical visitor to Paris zeros in on its cavernous national gallery, the Louvre. The more adventurous may roam that Aladdin's cave of Impressionist paintings, the Musee d'Orsay.

The Musee Rodin rarely makes the cut. What a mistake. The rococo mansion, whose garden sprawls like a Parisian park, is a sight in itself. And it houses two of the world's most striking sculptures: The Thinker and The Kiss.

Created in 1885, The Kiss underscores Auguste Rodin's belief that the artist should make no concessions to politeness. The woman, her body arched, is almost strangling the man, who squeezes her thigh as their mouths lock.

The passion packed into the statue mirrors the fervour that marked Rodin's relationship with Camille Claudel, the tousle-haired waif who some scholars say had as much talent as the master. Rodin apparently thought so, too. "I showed her where to find gold, but the gold she found was her own," he said.

The golden girl's presence permeates the museum. Claudel modelled hands and feet for a patriotic piece called the Burghers of Calais and posed for figures in Rodin's meditation on the afterlife, Gates of Hell. The museum has examples of Claudel's work, including The Wave, which resembles a giant mouth engulfing the three figurines dancing inside it.

A Rodin nude depicting a man at the feet of a woman, Eternal Idol, may be a graphic expression of how he felt towards Claudel. "My darling down on both knees before your beautiful body which I embrace," Rodin wrote in an 1885 letter to her. Nonetheless, their love was marred by treachery, madness and obsession.

Claudel wanted to become a sculptor from childhood. In 1881, she moved to Paris, equipped with, "a superb brow above magnificent eyes of that rare blue so seldom encountered outside the covers of a novel," as her writer brother Paul put it.

She met Rodin in 1883 and entered his studio the next year, swiftly making the transition from student to muse and mistress. But in the early 1890s, Claudel began to see that she would never succeed in supplanting Rodin's petite significant other, a seamstress named Rose Beuret. In 1898, Rodin and Claudel separated. It affected Claudel terribly. By 1905, her psychological state had deteriorated severely. Descending into paranoia, she destroyed a year's worth of her work and disappeared for months at a time. After her father's death in 1913, she was committed to an asylum, where she remained until her death 30 years later at the age of 79.

Beuret seems to have fared little better. Rodin treated her like a slave: her duties included buttoning his shoes. He married her a fortnight before she died, but disowned their son. Despite countless honours and recognition as, perhaps, the world's most famous artist, Rodin was usually depressed and sickly.

Rodin died the same year as Beuret, 1917, at the age of 77, and was buried in Meudon, the Paris suburb in which he had a villa. In accordance with his wishes, his other haunt, the Hotel Biron, was transformed into the seductive City of Love attraction you can lose yourself in today: his eponymous museum.

Musee Rodin, 77 Rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris (www.musee-rodin.fr/welcome.htm).