Cezanne's Quarry

by Barbara Corrado Pope

  “That’s the four seasons. They’re the earliest, copied from magazines,” said Mme Cézanne, who had stuck to Martin’s side. “And that,” she pointed to a darker panel that divided representations of spring and summer from winter and fall, “that’s Papa.” Martin approached to take a closer look at the father’s portrait. At this point, the artist seemed to have reduced his palette to two or three colors. Strangest of all, Martin discovered when he bent slightly and squinted hard at the bottom of the four seasons, someone had signed each of the panels with the name of the great painter Ingres.

  “That was a joke.” Marie had crept up behind them.

  “Ahh.” Martin smiled at the mother. “These are all done directly on the wall, then, making this a lovely eighteenth-century drawing room, with frescoes.” This was a lame compliment, but the mother did not seem to mind.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Mme Cézanne answered, pursing her lips. “More like practice, trying things out. Papa even got a little upset when Paul did the nude, because of our daughters. But art is art,” she added brightly.

  Indeed. The only problem was that none came even close to matching the piece of canvas that Franc had found in the quarry. And none could be construed as having anything to do with Solange Vernet.

  “Are there more?”

  “Oh, yes, dozens and dozens. Paul has gotten better and better,” the mother assured him.

  “Are they here?”

  “Paul doesn’t like anyone to disturb his things.” Marie was still hovering behind, ever alert.

  “I would like very much to see them.”

  “Oh, he’s very insistent on that. Even we—”

  “Yes, even we,” echoed the mother, “dare not touch anything.”

  The other paintings were in the house somewhere. But how was he going to get to see them without a full-scale confrontation? “Perhaps later,” Martin murmured, heading back to his chair.

  “I don’t think so,” Marie’s voice rang out behind him.

  “Please,” he took up his notebook again. “I have a few more questions.” He could probe what they knew about Cézanne’s love affairs before he tried to see the paintings again.

  The sister stood stock-still at the end of the room until her mother bade her over. “Come, Marie. Let’s help out the young judge. Get this over with.” The mother sat down and folded her hands in her lap again. Marie complied, but remained standing by her mother’s side.

  “You know of Charles Westerbury then,” Martin began. “Had Paul ever talked to you about a woman named Solange Vernet?”

  “No!” Even Marie must have realized that this came out too sharply. “No,” she repeated, more quietly.

  “Did he ever tell you,” Martin continued evenly, “that he had taken part in their—that is, Westerbury’s and Vernet’s—circle?”

  Mme Cézanne shook her head slowly and thoughtfully, as if she were seriously striving to answer the question. Marie’s gestures of denial were more vigorous. And much less convincing. Martin surmised that she must be Paul’s confidante.

  “Mlle Cézanne, did your brother ever talk about Westerbury or Vernet?”

  “I told you, he didn’t know them. Not as far as I know, anyway.”

  “Then why would he have such strong opinions about Westerbury?”

  “I told him about the lecture.”

  The old maid was quick on her feet.

  “Well, we do know that he attended at least a few of their Thursday evenings. And it is quite possible that he was carrying on an affair with Solange Vernet.”

  The mother gasped. Marie’s mouth froze into a grim line.

  “Is she the one who was murdered?” Mme Cézanne inquired. Whatever secrets the brother had told the sister about the affair had not been shared with the mother.

  “Yes,” he said, “strangled and stabbed to death in the Bibémus quarry.”

  Mme Cézanne covered her mouth with one hand while grasping her daughter’s hand with the other. Marie was calmer. “When?”she asked.

  Martin ignored the question. He wanted answers first. “Can you tell me where Paul was each day and night from last Sunday evening until this morning?”

  “Of course we can’t. That’s four days. He’s a grown man with work to do.” Marie was stroking her mother’s hand, taking charge.

  “How about last Monday? Was he here? Do you know where he went to paint?”

  “I told you we don’t—”

  “What if I told you that we found a piece of a canvas in the quarry not far from the body?”

  “Oh my!” Mme Cézanne stood up and turned away from him.

  “How do you know it was Paul’s?”

  Martin looked straight at the sister. “That’s one of the things I am here to find out.” Then he got up and approached the mother. “Do you know anything you should be telling me?” he said to her back.

  She whirled around. “No, really. No. I just can’t believe that Paul would even know people who could do something like this.”

  “He didn’t.” Marie repeated the lie through clenched teeth.

  “Ah yes, but he did.”

  “You’re hateful.” Martin could have sworn that she was about to stamp her feet.

  “And,” he moved to capitalize on the mother’s shock, “there may be others in danger. There was a boy who brought a message to Mme Vernet, the message that lured her into the quarry. The boy has not been found.”

  “This is ridiculous!” Marie Cézanne crossed her arms.

  “Can you tell me,” he persisted in ignoring the sister, “anything about your son’s whereabouts on Monday and Tuesday?”

  “No,” the mother was shaking her head, peering into his face, as if pleading with him to believe her. “No. It was just as always. Painting here, painting there. Always working.”

  “And there was nothing different about his behavior?”

  “No, no.” Her head kept shaking.

  “And of course you believe that your son is incapable of murder.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you must help me prove him innocent.”

  “There’s nothing I can—”

  “Yes, there is. You can show me your son’s paintings. Now. Who knows? I may find that he had nothing to do with the quarry canvas.” Martin’s entire body was taut with tension. He had to see the paintings. He had to know once and for all whether Paul Cézanne was the author of the quarry fragment.

  “Mother, he has no right.”

  “But you know,” he said to Marie, “that I do. And if I cannot look at them here, then I will send the gendarmes to bring them all back to the courthouse.”

  “No!” The mother put up her hand.

  “Mother!”

  She laid her hand on her daughter’s arm. “Who knows what more commotion would do to Papa. We can’t have the police tramping about. And we know Paul did not do anything to that woman.”

  Marie broke away again from her mother and turned her back on both of them.

  “You may come up as long as you keep very quiet,” Mme Cézanne told Martin. “Papa is ill.”

  “Of course.” He was breathing again and intent on showing this mother that he was a nice, respectful young man worthy of her confidence. There was so much more that he wanted to get out of her.

  “All right, then,” she put her finger to her mouth as a signal to him before opening the door onto the hall.

  He followed the mother up the stairs, past a room where he caught a glimpse of the maid talking to her bedridden master. When they reached the third floor, Mme Cézanne led him into one of its two rooms. “That,” she said, pointing to the left, “is Paul’s bedroom, and this,” she swung open the door, “is his studio.”

  Martin’s heart sank. It would take him hours to get through everything. The room was a jumble of bottles, paints, brushes, vases, bowls, tools, and bizarre objects standing in disarray on tables and shelves. Rags, spotted with paint, lay on the wooden floor. Innumerable canvases pinned
to wooden frames were stacked up against the walls, while others lay curled up in the corners. On the easel in the middle of the room was a half-painted still life, which immediately identified the sour smell that had announced itself when they opened the door—rotting apples.

  “Oh dear.” Mme Cézanne rushed to the table behind the easel and picked up a bowl of decaying fruit. “I wish Paul would let Jeanne come up here more often.” She set the bowl out in the hall and returned. “Let’s open the windows. I don’t think there is enough wind to blow anything about, do you?”

  As Martin helped her yank open the windows, he discovered why the house had seemed askew from the outside. The windows had been enlarged to bring more sunlight into the studio.

  “I like the smell of apples,” he said. “It reminds me of my mother making cider in the fall.” Martin’s hope that this would be a winning remark was rewarded.

  She smiled. “You’re from the north.” His accent had given him away again.

  “Lille.”

  “A long way to come to start your career.”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled again and took a seat on a stool. She was not entirely unsympathetic, but she was not about to leave him alone in her son’s studio.

  Martin waded in. He hadn’t thought, until he saw the disarray, that he might find a murder weapon. But after examining the painter’s knives, he knew that none of them were long or sharp enough to have harmed Solange Vernet. He could see Mme Cézanne’s relief when he put them aside and gave her a quick reassuring smile. Then he picked up a skull, the most ghoulish of the objects sitting on the shelves. Mme Cézanne explained that her son liked to draw it because of the way the light and shadow hit its curves. Martin put the human head back on the shelf and began the daunting task of going through the paintings.

  According to Mme Cézanne, the most recent works were standing in stacks against the walls. Martin could see in these still lifes and landscapes a vibrancy that he had not discerned in the scrap found by Franc. What connected these paintings to the fragment was their geometrical aspect, the way that the small straight strokes became little blocks of color, which, laid side by side, actually produced a recognizable shape. When Martin uncovered a picture of Mont Sainte-Victoire, he sucked in his breath. Solange Vernet’s words echoed in his mind. “Only two men could fight over a mountain.” Was this an earlier version of the painting that had hung in her salon? It really didn’t matter. The artist’s unique style had already given him away. There was no doubt in Martin’s mind that Cézanne had painted the quarry canvas.

  “Do you need to see more?” Mme Cézanne’s question made Martin realize that he must have been standing still for quite some time, holding the depiction of the mountain before him.

  “Yes.” He gathered his thoughts. “Any portraits?”

  The mother made a gesture toward a pile of rolled canvases in the corner. She positioned herself more comfortably on the stool and began fanning her face with a little flowered fan she had pulled from her pocket. The sun pouring in through the enlarged windows made the room damnably hot.

  The canvases displayed a hodgepodge of styles and subjects—bathers, fruit, flowers, portraits, landscapes, houses, allegories. Martin paused during his rapid survey to ask Mme Cézanne to identify some of the sitters. The first was a self-portrait, showing Paul Cézanne in one of the hats made in the shop his father had once owned. The artist wore a full dark brown beard and mustache that matched the strands of unkempt hair falling beneath the black bowler. His nose was large and slightly hooked. Most remarkable of all were the ebony eyes, which stared out warily at the world. A more recent self-portrait revealed the baldness that Cézanne had covered with his father’s haberdashery.

  Then Martin unrolled a series of portraits that seemed to be laid on with a trowel. According to Mme Cézanne, these were “early works,” depicting her brother Dominique, a bailiff at the courthouse. Martin did not recognize him from the pictures and was getting discouraged. He was going further and further back in time, away from the possibility of seeing anything that had to do with Solange Vernet. Just as he decided that he had to make one final push before he melted, he began to unroll, one right after another, lurid scenes of eroticism and violence.

  Martin’s mounting interest drew Mme Cézanne to him. “Oh, those,” she said. “They were from his studies in Paris, twenty years ago.”

  Ignoring her comment, Martin scrutinized each picture with growing fascination. What kind of a man could have produced them? The figures were too crude to be recognizable as individual people. But many of the women in them had golden-red hair. One small canvas that struck Martin as particularly vulgar depicted a naked woman with her legs spread apart, suspended on a bed above a legion of adoring men. She was almost faceless and not particularly attractive. Yet the men, who came from all walks of life—including musicians, wrestlers, a soldier, even a bishop, identified by his miter —seemed to be worshiping her. At the bottom, in the very center, was a man seen from the back. His profession was not identified by his attire, but the man’s baldness was fringed by the same ring of dark hair that circled Cézanne’s head in his self-portraits. The only thing Martin could discern about this unidentified figure was that he could not keep his eyes off the woman who was so lewdly revealing herself. Is this how Cézanne saw Solange Vernet in her salon? Embarrassed, Martin tried to move the painting away from Mme Cézanne’s insistent eyes, but she was right behind him.

  “Some were just illustrations, you know, from other paintings or from stories or plays,” she explained. “Paul doesn’t do this kind of thing any more.”

  Martin said nothing as he rolled up this canvas and set it aside to take with him. At the very least, it was evidence of a troubled mind.

  The next two canvases were even more disturbing—murder scenes. Both victims were women with golden-red hair. In the first, the homicidal instrument was a knife; in the second, strangulation. In each, there were two accomplices. In the knifing, a strong woman held the victim down while a man aimed his weapon straight at her heart.

  “See here,” Mme Cézanne’s finger pointed to the background of the second picture. “Doesn’t that look like curtains in a stage play?” Or an archway cut out of a quarry, Martin thought. There was no doubt about the strangled woman’s anguish. Her head hung toward the viewer, hair falling in all directions, just as Solange Vernet’s hair had been in the quarry, in fiery disarray. The only signs of life were her outstretched arms. Her eyes were open. Had she been pleading with Cézanne for mercy? Was she pleading with Martin now for justice?

  He stood up straight with the lewd scene and the graphic portrayal of the strangulation in his hands. “I’ll have to take these with me,” he said, as casually as possible. “Can I roll them together?”

  “You know they may be quite valuable some day. I am not sure I can let—”

  “Madame,” he wished he could soften the blow, “I am sure that your son painted the fragment we found in the quarry.”

  “But these are old pictures. I’ve told you. Can’t you tell how much better Paul has gotten?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” He tried to assure her. “But I want Paul himself to tell me about these.” To tell me whether they are evidence of a murder or only the product of a disturbed mind. These were thoughts he would not dream of expressing to the poor mother.

  Martin stood there like a fool for a few minutes, gingerly holding the paintings. He did not want to barge out. He still needed the mother’s help.

  “Here, let me,” Mme Cézanne finally said as she took the canvases away from him, rolled them together, and tied them with a string. She was frowning during the entire operation. Martin was no longer a nice young judge.

  Mme Cézanne thrust the two rolled paintings into his hand.

  “One more thing.” Martin took a deep breath. The most important thing. “You need to tell me where your son is.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t—”

  “If I h
ave to, I will question everyone in the house, including the maid and your husband.” Martin could see from her face that he had hit the mark.

  “My son did not do anything.”

  “Madame—”

  “Is this what you call justice? Allowing a family to be bothered and bullied? Accusing them?”

  “This is a murder case. Others may be in danger.” Martin said the words slowly and distinctly, hoping that this would persuade her.

  There was a moment of silence, then she relented.

  “Please be quiet coming down the stairs. I will explain everything when we get back to the salon.” Behind closed doors, out of the hearing of the father.

  In the salon, Mme Cézanne revealed a secret that was far beyond anything Martin had imagined. Cézanne had a mistress who had borne him a son thirteen years before. According to the proud grandmother, Paul Jr. was a beautiful, strapping boy, but his grandfather had never been told that a grandson existed. Louis-Auguste believed that a man should be able to support a wife before marriage, and so Paul and his mistress, Hortense Fiquet, were waiting for the right moment to inform the patriarch of their relationship. Then, and only then, would they marry. This summer Paul had settled his family in Gardanne, about ten kilometers away. That is where he went almost every day to work. After the Westerbury disturbance, Mme Cézanne explained, he had told Marie that he would be staying with Hortense and Paul Jr. until things quieted down. He did not want Papa to be disturbed, and he needed peace to do his work.

  Martin left the Jas with a sense of relief. He had managed to bypass the bulldog of a sister and gotten Mme Cézanne to talk. Best of all, he believed the old woman. Finally, someone was telling him the truth! The most urgent question in Martin’s mind, as he headed back to town with the two rolled canvases in tow, was whether he should organize an expedition to Gardanne that evening, or wait until the morning. That was the first thing he intended to take up with Franc when he got back to the courthouse.