She Who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmière

She Who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmière is a Rodin sculpture represented in the story by a full-size, microscopically exact bronze photopantogram. Mike selects it as a gift for Jubal, recognizing both the sculpture’s beauty and its unusual emotional resemblance to the Martian world he has lost. The replica becomes a meeting point between Mike’s homesickness and Jubal’s concealed artistic preference: a reproduction made possible through diplomatic favor, yet subject to a request that it never be publicly exhibited.

The choice of a gift

Finding a present for Jubal is difficult precisely because he can already buy anything he wants. The search begins with comicly impossible possibilities—the Sphinx, three wishes, or a day of youth—before Duke offers a more practical clue: Jubal likes statues. Anne and Jill look through the art books in Jubal’s study, where the evidence of his taste is present not as a collection of displayed sculpture but in the books he has repeatedly opened and handled.

Anne identifies Rodin as the artist Jubal would favor and proposes Eternal Springtime as one possibility. Mike barely looks at that image. Turning the page, he chooses the sculpture that will become the gift, despite Jill’s immediate revulsion at its appearance. The disagreement makes the selection more than a matter of shopping: Mike sees beauty where Jill sees something dreadful, and his judgment does not yield to her rebuke.

Mike’s recognition and Anne’s evidence

Mike’s confidence rests on an intimate, disorienting response. Although the work depicts a human woman, it gives him a feeling that a Martian Old One must have been somewhere near its creation. It is the first thing he has seen on Earth that feels like a breath of home. His recognition is therefore not simply a preference for an image or an attempt to guess what Jubal might like; the sculpture carries, for Mike, a trace of a world and a kind of beauty he knows from Mars.

Anne confirms the choice by examining the physical evidence in Jubal’s books. One volume falls open naturally at three places, but the page Mike has chosen has been handled more than the others. Anne says Jubal likes The Caryatid Who Has Fallen under the Weight of Her Stone almost as much, while identifying Mike’s selection as Jubal’s favorite. The tactile marks left by repeated reading turn Mike’s apparently intuitive choice into a successful reading of Jubal’s private habits.

From irreplaceable original to replica

Mike decides to buy the work, only to discover that it is not for sale. Anne calls the Rodin Museum in Paris on his behalf, but the museum’s position is categorical: the original cannot be sold, and the work may not be reproduced. The scene establishes the obstacle not as a lack of money but as the protected status of an artwork treated as beyond ordinary purchase and copying.

Anne then contacts Bradley. A few days later, he reports an extraordinary exception arranged as a compliment from the French government. Mike will receive no original, but a full-size, microscopically exact bronze photopantogram of She Who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmière. The gift carries a condition: the French government makes a strongly worded request that it never be publicly exhibited. The result preserves the distinction between the unavailable original and its precise replica, even as it allows Mike to give Jubal the work he has recognized as the one he wants.

Art, memory, and private taste

The object gathers several different acts of looking into one exchange. Jubal’s preference is legible in the well-handled pages of his books; Mike recognizes in the pictured woman an echo of home; Jill’s first reaction reveals how sharply beauty can divide observers; and Anne connects these responses by reading both the image and the evidence of Jubal’s attention. The sculpture’s significance in the episode lies not only in its form, but in the different meanings its viewers find there.

Its reproduction also preserves a tension rather than resolving it. The French government’s gift makes an otherwise impossible present possible, but the request against public display places the replica under a limit even as it travels to Jubal. For Mike, the image has already crossed a more personal distance: it makes Earth feel briefly capable of holding something familiar from Mars. For Jubal, it is the answer to a gift-giving problem that began with the assumption that money could not supply anything he truly wanted.