La Belle Heaulmière

La Belle Heaulmière, the replica of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture in Jubal Harshaw’s gallery, becomes the focus of a charged encounter with Ben Caxton. Jubal answers Ben’s dismissive response not simply by defending a work of art, but by teaching him to perceive the woman represented in it: aged and physically changed, yet still carrying the young woman she once was. The sculpture’s decisive role is to make looking an ethical act, demanding attention to a personhood that a glance might mistake for ugliness or decline.

The Gallery and the Encounter

Jubal shows Ben the alterations to his house, including a new north wing and, upstairs, a gallery filled with exact replicas of celebrated sculpture. Ben calls the collection an accumulation of statues and asks when Jubal acquired the rest of it. Jubal corrects his vocabulary—these are sculptures, not statues—and asks that they be regarded reverently. The exchange establishes the terms on which La Belle Heaulmière will be encountered: Ben sees an awkward object, while Jubal insists on an artwork worthy of sustained attention.

Jubal turns to the replica and addresses it tenderly as La Belle Heaulmière. He asks it not to heed Ben, whom he calls a barbarian, and touches the figure’s ravaged cheek and one empty, shrunken breast. He tells her to be patient, saying that it cannot be much longer. The gesture makes his response intimate rather than detached: the sculpture is not merely an example in a collection, but a presence to whom he speaks with sympathy. Its damaged, aged body is the very feature that provokes his care.

A Lesson in Seeing

When Ben remains perplexed, Jubal interrupts whatever else he has come to discuss and says that he must first learn how to look at sculpture. He frames the lesson through changing ways of seeing age. Anyone can look at a pretty young woman and recognize her beauty; an artist can imagine the old woman she will become, and a better artist can find the young woman who once existed within an old one. Rodin, in Jubal’s account, goes further: he portrays the old woman exactly as she is while making the viewer see the young woman still alive within her altered body.

Jubal presents this achievement as a transformation in the viewer, not a correction to the sculpture. Rodin does not disguise the figure’s age or restore an idealized youthful appearance. Instead, the artwork makes even an insensitive observer perceive the continuity of the woman beneath the body’s visible changes, and feel the tragedy of a life in which the heart’s youth outlasts the body’s. The lesson shifts Ben from judging the figure’s appearance toward recognizing the personhood and history that appearance cannot contain.

Anne’s Response and Ben’s Change

Jubal asks Anne for her opinion of the bronze. She says that at first she thought it horrible, but has come to consider it possibly the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. Her response echoes the movement Jubal describes: initial revulsion gives way, through looking, to an apprehension of beauty. Jubal accepts her judgment and dismisses her, then asks Ben whether he wants to argue with it. Ben declines to dispute Anne but admits that he still does not understand the sculpture.

Jubal’s explanation ends by distinguishing his own and Ben’s experience from the figure’s. Growing old, he says, does not matter to them because they were never meant to be admired; for women, he insists, it matters. He directs Ben to look again. After doing so, Ben is moved to tears. Jubal tells him to blow his nose and wipe his eyes, saying that the sculpture accepts his apology, and then closes the lesson. The change is modest but decisive: the work has made its formerly dismissive viewer feel what his first judgment excluded.

Meaning and Limits of the Scene

La Belle Heaulmière stands in the scene at the intersection of artistic representation and aging. Jubal praises the sculpture precisely because it neither hides the body’s deterioration nor allows deterioration to define the woman. Its force lies in holding two perceptions together: the old woman is shown exactly as she is, and the young woman she was remains imaginatively present. Jubal’s words make that double vision the measure of great art.

The episode also reveals a tension in Jubal’s defense. He rebukes Ben for rudeness and demands reverence for the figure, but explains her significance through the importance he assigns to women’s beauty and admiration. His lesson enlarges the act of looking by insisting that age does not erase the person within the body; at the same time, it describes aging through the loss of a beauty for which women, unlike men, are said to be admired. The sculpture’s encounter with Ben therefore carries both Jubal’s empathy and the gendered terms through which he articulates it.