Cezanne's Quarry

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  Arlette told him little he did not already know. Her description of the boy was, as Franc had said, applicable to a hundred street urchins in Aix alone.

  “And the message. Did you see it? What did it say?”

  “I don’t read.”

  “What did she say about the message?” he asked impatiently.

  Arlette took a deep breath. “She said it said ‘I love you. Meet me at the quarry.’”

  “Was it signed?” And if it was, would she tell him?

  “No,” almost in a whisper, “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why did she go?”

  “At first she didn’t know what to do. Then she thought that maybe he—M. Westerbury—was too humiliated to come back to the apartment. That maybe he had something to show her. Something he wanted her to be the first to see. Some surprise.” Arlette stopped, her face in a grimace. “I think maybe he didn’t want to come back here because of me. I don’t think he likes me. I don’t think he liked it that I was here when they quarreled.” She could no longer hold back the tears.

  “Why did she go alone?” Martin insisted.

  Arlette wailed, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I asked if she wanted me to go with her. She told me, ‘I have to do this. I have to do this alone. It’s a place where we were happy together.’” By now, Arlette LaFarge’s sobbing was so deep that it came out as a series of groans.

  Why, Martin thought, why did Solange Vernet go? Did she really love and trust Westerbury that much? Even after their quarrel?

  When Arlette finally quieted down, he asked her if she knew where the note was. The maid’s eyes widened with fear as she shook her head. He was almost positive that she was lying.

  “Did Westerbury ask you to find it for him?”

  “No, sir, no. Truly. They tried to search me already. Don’t—”

  “If you know where it is, and you are not telling me—” Too late, Martin realized that he had been shaking his finger at her. He needed to be get control of himself.

  “Don’t, don’t,” she repeated as he withdrew his hand.

  Don’t what? Brutalize her? Bully her? Even if he wanted to, what good would it do? She had had a lifetime of facing up to men far more brutal than he. Perhaps it would be better, and certainly more just, if he got the information out of the real scoundrel, Professor Charles Westerbury.

  Martin rose and slipped his notebook into his pocket. He stood, considering Arlette for a moment before he delivered his last admonition. “If you do find the note or the letter, you will bring them to me immediately. Or you will be in serious trouble.”

  Arlette nodded without meeting his eyes. Then she murmured, “She didn’t have on her gloves.”

  “What?” he could barely hear her.

  Arlette stared at the floor as she spoke. “You said you wanted me to help, to think of anything that was not right. When I went to the basement in the prison to fold her things, they didn’t have her gloves.” She was talking more to herself than to him. “That wasn’t like her, not to wear her gloves. Mme Solange was a lady. I’m sure she didn’t go out without her gloves.”

  Arlette’s cataleptic declaration didn’t strike Martin as particularly relevant, but it did catch him off guard, evoking unbidden images—the white-gloved finger pointing at Darwin’s book, the gray swollen hands curled in anguished protest, the face distorted into a silent scream. It was good to remember these things, to remember that this case was more than a contest between him and Westerbury—or anyone else. No matter who Solange Vernet had been, she did not deserve what had happened to her.

  Chastened for the moment, Martin found his own hat and headed down the stairs back to the Cours, leaving Arlette LaFarge in her chair to contemplate what she had and had not revealed.

  8

  WESTERBURY WAS IN THE QUARRY, trying to lay his hands on anything that could be used against him. He knew all too well how easy it would be to convict a foreigner and cut off his head in one fell swoop. If he was the great geologist who could pick up a rock and within minutes describe its million-year-old history, he thought as he frantically searched through the rubble, why in God’s name, when it was a matter of life and death, could he not find anything now? His gaze fixed on the dark red stain beneath the quarried archway. His Solange. His lady of secret sorrows. And secret sins. How he longed for a drink! But he knew that the only way to survive was to remain sober. Logical. That’s what it had come to. No flights of fancy. No acts of genius. Think and see. What pieces of himself had he left behind here? Were there any more traces of Cézanne?

  After another quarter hour, Westerbury sat down on a boulder and swatted at a bug that had crawled up from his collar. The insects with their incessant buzzing and stinging were the only signs of life in the hellhole of mutilated sandstone. He wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief and took a flask from his pack. The warm water did little to quench his thirst. Frustrated, he almost threw the flask away, but thought the better of it. Sois raisonable. Be reasonable. If only he had listened to her. He must keep searching. Or flee. Sauve qui peut! Wasn’t that another one of their favorite expressions? Run for your life!

  But where to? Surely they were watching the train station. Even if he got away, where could he go? Without Solange, he already felt hollow. Every doubt that he had ever had about himself, his bastard birth, his lack of station and education, kept gnawing at him. What could he do without the confidence she gave him, the admiration that shone in her eyes—and, of course, the money? If he fled, he would not be “the famous Professor Westerbury.” He’d be a man on the run. He would be nothing.

  No, Solange was right as always: he needed to act reasonably, without the kind of foolishness that had possessed him at the Jas in his drunken fury. He had to lie low, going about his business while crying for justice like a righteous soul. If he managed to stay out of jail, he would eventually confront the bastard, the great artist, the self-professed seer who saw nothing.

  Westerbury scoured the blazing orange boulders one last time before limping up toward the Bibémus road. The pebbles were cutting into the soles of his boots. How weary he was. At least he had gotten to the maid before they did, imploring her to find the note for him. But there was so much more they could get out of her. She had heard the quarrel. She knew about the letter. Why hadn’t he gotten rid of Arlette in Paris? They certainly had not needed that sad little creature in their new life. Now she could ruin him. All she cared about was Solange. Arlette LaFarge could not possibly understand what Charles Westerbury was suffering.

  He staggered on. The letter would forever be a knife wound in his heart, tearing at him, humiliating him. No one must ever see it, even if it cost him his life. If only he had destroyed it instead of burying it at the foot of the mountain. Somehow he had known, even then, that he was burying their love there, forever.

  9

  MARTIN RETURNED TO HIS CHAMBERS in a gloomy mood. He had been deceived. He doubted that the maid had told him everything she knew, and he was absolutely certain that Westerbury had lied to him. Not only was the note beckoning Solange Vernet to the quarry missing, but so was a letter that she had spent hours writing just before she died. A letter that Westerbury had kept hidden from him. A letter that had become Solange Vernet’s last testament.

  Martin needed some good news, and Old Joseph did not provide it; quite to the contrary. The greffier’s report only gave Martin a compelling reason to confront the Cézannes immediately, for it revealed that Paul Cézanne was in the habit of evading authorities and getting away with it.

  In 1870 the artist had fled Aix to avoid military service during the Prussian War. When the gendarmes searched the family estate for the deserter, his parents claimed they did not know where he was. It turned out, Joseph noted in the margins of the copied police report, that Cézanne spent the war just twenty-five kilometers to the south, in a village on the Mediterranean called l’Estaque. Cézanne’s lack of patriotism apparently had not turned the Aix establishment
against the family. In 1871, after the French defeat, his father Louis-Auguste got elected to the new Republican municipal council, despite the fact that he was seventy-two at the time and had not even offered himself up as a candidate. Then the city records show that Cézanne père nominated his son for an arts commission. This had probably been a way to provide Paul Cézanne with a salary, for, according to Joseph, the census consistently listed him as an “artist” or “painter.” Nothing had come of the proposal for a commission and, as far as Martin knew, nothing had come of the art either.

  Even so, the Cézannes were a formidable family, and he was unlikely to find the son without their help. The father had gone from haberdasher to banker in rapid order, and owned a town house as well as the eighteenth-century noble estate, the so-called Jas de Bouffan. Striving to be helpful as always, Joseph had translated the Provençal as the “Habitation of the Little Puffs of Wind.” Martin set the report aside and pulled at his cravat. He hoped, on this endlessly still, hot afternoon, that the Jas would live up to its name.

  Martin decided to go alone. There was no reason to put up a sign of force when he could not possibly round up enough men to prevent an escape or smoke Cézanne out of a hiding place. Instead, Martin thought ruefully, he would have to rely on his youthful charm. Older women seemed to take to him. He brought out all their maternal and match-making instincts. For once, this might work to his advantage.

  Before leaving for the Jas, Martin searched through the material evidence in his cabinet. Just as Arlette LaFarge had said, there were no gloves. Why? The scrap of canvas found at the quarry offered one answer. If her gloves had been stained with paint, there would have been a motive to get rid of them. All the more reason to haul in Cézanne. Martin stared at the painting fragment, fixing it in his mind. He would be looking for a match at the Jas.

  It took less than an hour to get there, walking due west of town past neat, fragrant, freshly scythed wheatfields. When he reached his destination, Martin took a moment to scrutinize the Cézanne estate through the tall iron fence that separated it from its neighbors. The Jas de Bouffan was not a welcoming sight. Its gardens, in stunning contrast to the well-tended farms he had just passed, were a jumble of neglect, overgrown and desiccated. Even the three-story mansion beyond them looked a little off-kilter. Half of the top floor seemed to have an upward tilt. Before pushing open the heavy barred gate, Martin slapped the dust off his coat and pants and retied his cravat. He wanted be presentable, even if the Jas was not.

  As he made his way up the driveway, Martin noted that the Cézanne property extended well to the west and back of the house. Presumably, Louis-Auguste was one of the richest men in Aix, yet he had let his holdings fall into a deplorable state. The orange stucco on the house was chipped and peeling, as was the dark green paint on the shutters. The whole place seemed closed off, hardly inhabited. Yet Martin knew the Cézanne family was there. He moistened his lips with his tongue and took a few deep breaths before pounding the knocker against the thick wooden door.

  A woman wearing a crimson dress and white apron answered the door. She was a country girl, younger, bigger, and healthier than Arlette. Martin tipped his hat, introduced himself, and was left standing in the hallway while the maid went upstairs to find “the mistress.”

  Finally, a tall middle-aged woman descended and invited him into the large, darkened salon behind the wooden doors on his left. “You’ve come to hear about our complaint. Good,” she said, as she pointed to an easy chair.

  Already he was on the wrong footing. He had expected an older woman, and he certainly had not come with the intention of appeasing the household.

  “You are Mme Cézanne?” He hoped not.

  “No. Mademoiselle. Marie Cézanne. But I do most of the managing around here for my mother and father.”

  “Ahh.” He forced a smile. She looked for all the world like an older version of Marthe DuPont. Straight back, dark hair piled at the neck, plain navy blue dress, a cross protecting her bosom. “I’ve come about a number of matters, but I will also need to speak to your mother.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “Murder is a very serious business.”

  That brought her up short.

  “I don’t see what we could possibly have to say about murder.”

  “Please, I will need to speak with everyone who witnessed the disturbance and—”

  “So she’s really dead then,” Marie Cézanne said, ignoring his last words. “That’s why that man was shouting and carrying on last night.” Without waiting for him to respond, she left the room, closing the double doors behind her.

  While he waited, Martin grew increasingly anxious that someone was warning Cézanne about his presence. Martin finally got up and, feeling a little foolish, pressed his ear to the door. Hearing footsteps and female voices, he made a quick retreat. This time an old woman entered with Marie and the maid.

  Mme Cézanne, a shorter, plumper version of her daughter, was more cordial and forthcoming. “So, a serious business, monsieur le juge. I hope you understand that causing a disturbance is serious too, especially since Papa is so ill. And, as we told your officer, Paul is not here.” She smiled as if she had just told him all he needed to know. “It’s hot. Would you like something to drink?”

  “Water would be fine.”

  “Jeanne, water for everyone,” she announced, as if this were an act of singular largess.

  “And so. . . .” She and her daughter sat before him, in two straight chairs on either side of a small round table. Their hands lay folded on their laps as they waited for him to start.

  What Martin desperately wanted to know was whether or not Paul Cézanne was in the house or on the grounds. If they had plans to protect him, as they had done during the war, they were not likely to tell Martin anything until he got them on his side. He cleared his throat and took out his notebook.

  “I’m sorry about what happened. I’m sure the inspector also expressed—”

  “Not really,” Marie said, righteously.

  “Do you know who the intruder was?”

  “Why, Mr. Westerbury, of course.” Marie again.

  “How did you know that?”

  There was a pause, then both spoke at once. “Paul—” said the mother; “I—” began Marie. They stopped, glanced at each other, and fell silent.

  “Paul told you it was Charles Westerbury?” Martin asked, turning to Mme Cézanne.

  She looked down and nodded, realizing her error.

  “Then Paul must have been here at the time.”

  Another nod.

  “Was Paul here when my inspector arrived?”

  “Oh no, no. He took off early this morning and he hasn’t come back.” She said this with great conviction.

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No.” This was Marie.

  “How can that be?” he said to the sister.

  She shrugged. “He goes off and paints all over. He takes provisions, he carries his paints and easel on his back, and just goes.”

  “When will he return?”

  “Sometimes he’s gone for days.” This was the mother’s contribution to their story.

  “If he is here or if you know where he is—”

  “We don’t.” Marie again.

  Martin sighed. Paul Cézanne could be anywhere. In the very next room, hiding in a cupboard. Or behind a tree. Or even, as they alleged, off painting. As long as they were united against him, he had little chance. He need to change course, and quickly. “Then what were you going to say before?” he asked Marie. “Did you know Westerbury?”

  She glanced at her mother. “I knew of him.”

  “I mean, had you ever met him?”

  Marie sat up tall, defiant. “I went to one of his lectures.”

  “Only one?”

  “I didn’t find it that interesting.”

  “Really, I’ve found Westerbury to be quite a talker.”

  “Yes, and a godless charlatan.”


  “Really? Westerbury told me—”

  “My confessor told me that the lectures were a campaign of irreligion. There is no need to teach women about new, unproven so-called ‘science.’ And Paul knows that Westerbury is a charlatan. Paul has known Fortuné Marion for years. Fortuné teaches geology at Marseilles. They used to paint and hunt fossils together. We don’t need some foreigner to come in and exploit our environs.” Having delivered herself of her priest’s and brother’s opinions, she sat back, arms folded, daring Martin to continue the discussion, any discussion. He should have known he would get nowhere with the sister.

  The water arrived just in time. Martin accepted a glass from the tray presented by the maid and took a long swallow. He wrote down, “who attended Westerbury’s lectures?” if only because writing gave him something to do that looked serious and official. Marie Cézanne’s little speech and the uncomfortable silence that followed were all too reminiscent of those long pauses at the DuPont table, when Marthe, her sisters, her parents, and his own dear mother waited in vain for his assent to one of M. DuPont’s reactionary declarations about church and state. Martin took another slow draught to fill the time as he thought up some way to win over the mother. Only then did he become aware that the walls of the salon were covered with paintings.

  “May I?” he stood up.

  “Oh, yes.” Mme Cézanne rose. “Marie, pull the curtains so that M. Martin can see Paul’s work. We close them,” she explained, “to keep out the sun in the heat. We sometimes forget all this is here. He did them so long ago.”

  The movement of the heavy drapes coughed up swirls of glittering dust as the bright sunlight streaming through the tall windows illuminated the walls of the salon. Martin took his time circling the room. He was looking for a match with the quarry fragment. And trying to figure out something to say that would please the mother. The strange amalgam of crude works painted on the walls did not make this an easy task. There were allegorical pictures, portraits, illustrations of religious themes, and even a naked male torso. Oddest of all were the five pictures in the alcove, which could be lit up by gas lamps. Four of them were festive depictions of ill-proportioned women in various postures and dress. The fifth, in the center, was a portrait of a man reading the newspaper.