I’m a fan of Benjamin Lacombe’s style and own several books illustrated by him, so I’m accustomed to the high-quality artwork he brings to everything he illustrates, but I can’t hide my dismay at seeing how he nor Roumiguière handled “Beauty and the Beast” for this picture book retelling, whose artistic beauty doesn’t overwrite its problematic contents.
The first red flag is in the author’s notes, in which Lacombe says airily that he doesn’t like neither the Madame de Villeneuve original fairy tale nor the shortened Madame de Beaumont version, both of which he calls outmoded and moralistic.
And the second red flag came from scriptwriter Cécile Roumiguière, who stated on her page that she knew the fairy tale not from the original or the shortened version but from the Jean Cocteau film from 1946, and that Lacombe (who in his own words hated the original fairy tale) is a huge Disney fan that adores their animated motion picture.
Which such alarming unfamiliarity with and contempt for the source material, I pose a very valid question about why exactly these two were hired to create a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling?
The end product speaks for itself: such ignorance about and contempt for the source material have produced a profoundly offensive portrayal of Beast that is pure and unfiltered ableism.
So disgustingly ableist and even eugenicist a take on the nature of Beast that I would like to think the authors didn’t mean to do it on purpose, because the alternative doesn’t place them in a good light personally or professionally. Considering that Lacombe says in the author’s notes that he got convinced to illustrate a Beauty & Beast retelling that he never wanted to do before after visiting a Loire palace in which the portrait of Antonietta González is displayed, I embrace Hanlon’s Razor and assume no ill-intentions, even though that doesn’t erase the issue of ableism.
My regular readers know well my fascination for Petrus Gonsalvus/Pedro González, the 16th century Spaniard with hypertrichosis (excessive body hair that covers all the body like animal fur) who was gifted to King Henri II of France for his amusement, and who got married off to a beautiful woman named Catherine with whom he had several children, some of which inherited his hypertrichosis. This is the purported real case that is speculated to have inspired Madame de Villeneuve to write the fairy tale (which makes it all the odder that Lacombe dislikes it), and Antonietta is one of the couple’s hairy children.
According to Lacombe, Antonietta’s portrait made him want a different Beauty & Beast story that was based on the true story of the Gonsalvus family, particularly their youngest child that had been gifted as a circus “animal” to powerful Italian nobles. He endeavoured to do art for a story based on her to do her suffering justice—he claims grandly—not merely another picture book regurgitating Villeneuve or Beaumont.
And he ended up creating a collage built over the Beaumont version (without knowing it, I’m sure) with a heavy aesthetic loan from Disney (which has a troubling interpretation of the curse), and crowned with undeniable ableism that’s going to be a stain on his reputation and Roumiguière’s.
“Marquise, surely you exaggerate and it can’t be that terrible,” you’ll exclaim. “What could be so bad as to make you call a respectable artist and his scriptwriter ableist and borderline eugenicist?”
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