Martin found Clarie’s passionate objection to injustice charming. And he certainly did not disagree with her assessment of his inspector, who was crude, used his position to his advantage, and upheld the law as he saw fit. Yet, despite knowing all these things about Franc, he had no sure way of dealing with him.
Clarie got up again. “Let me go check the desserts, just to be sure. And you had better eat up. Who knows who will show up in a few minutes.”
Martin watched regretfully as she hurried to the kitchen to talk with her aunt and uncle. He had only a little more time to savor his meal and Clarie’s company.
Wednesday, August 26
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence.
—Sholem Asch, The Nazarene9
26
WHEN MARTIN CAME OUT OF THE Picard house, Franc was waiting for him, leaning against the wall to the left of the door, his cap firmly on his head, his arms crossed. Martin’s heart almost stopped.
“Sir.”
“Sir”—a good sign. Surely Franc was not going to arrest someone in the same moment that he was referring to him as “sir.”
“Franc, you gave me a fright. What are you doing standing there?” Martin pulled at his frock coat, trying to recover his composure.
“I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t want to disturb you, so I decided to wait for you to come out. I know you’re off to the Palais, and I thought you deserved a warning.”
About what? Martin sucked in a breath.
“You’ll never guess who the Cézannes have got down here to help them out,” Franc said. “They’re pulling out all the guns.”
The warning was about Cézanne, not about him. Martin coughed to cover up his relief, then asked Franc to tell him.
“Zola!”
“Zola, the writer?”
“Who else?”
“Zola is down here?”
“Yes, the master of pornography has decided to make an appearance in his home town to help out his old friend.” Franc shook his head in disgust.
“And do you know what he is planning to do exactly?”
“See you! Talk to you! Convince you that his friend didn’t do it. At least, that is what Cézanne’s mistress told one of my men when we tried to find the artist yesterday. She guaranteed that both of them would be at the Palais today. Ten o’clock sharp.”
Émile Zola in his chambers, cajoling him, convincing him? In Aix? Amazing.
“And I can’t help you, sir. You know I can’t deal with intellectuals. Especially intellectuals who write dirty books. I know you’ve been educated, and maybe you have a different attitude. Have you read any of that filth?”
“Yes.” Martin could not help smiling. It felt good to be back on the old footing, being a witness to his inspector’s pious, and undoubtedly hypocritical, opinions. “I’ve read several. You might even appreciate the last one, Germinal,” he added, only to tease Franc a little. “It was serialized in many of the penny presses. It’s about laboring men, northerners like yourself.”
“I don’t need to know more about him. He’s all yours. I’m sure you are smart enough not to let him change your mind about anything.”
Martin was not so sure. Matching wits with the greatest living writer in France was a daunting prospect. But this was not a discussion they should be having outside the windows of the Picard house. Martin took Franc by the elbow and led him to the other side of the narrow street. “The landlords,” he explained in a whisper before asking the inspector if he had managed to find out anything about the boy.
Franc shrugged. “Me and François asked around all the obvious places, for the third time, last night. Finally we got an old toothless whore to say she thought that a runaway calling himself Pierre had come to town a few weeks ago and disappeared around the time of the Vernet murder. He came begging, asking for odd jobs, and ended up running errands for the ‘ladies of the night.’”
“He did not say where he was from? Had no friends his own age? Anyone who might have seen—”
“I’m still working on it. Listen. Let me handle my job. It looks like you’re going to have your hands full too.”
“Right. Zola. Well, I guess I’d better get over there.” Martin tried to sound jaunty. “I’ll need to prepare even more now.”
“Yes. In the meantime, I’ll just concentrate on fulfilling my duties.”
Franc’s resentful tone brought Martin back down to earth. They were not on the “same old footing.” Something had changed between them, and most likely it had to do with Merckx. Martin held out his hand. He could not tell if Franc hesitated before he took it. “Thank you for the warning,” Martin said. “We’ll talk later.”
Franc tipped his cap and set off, leaving Martin to wonder what Zola could say that would prove his friend the artist was neither a coward nor a murderer.
Waiting for the bells of the Madeleine Church to toll ten times was like waiting for the clock to strike the hour of his orals in front of the final examining committee. Martin had done everything he knew how to prepare, yet there really was no way for him to be fully ready. When the ringing sounded through his half-opened window, he was tempted to go out in the hall to see if Zola had arrived, but forced himself to stay put. He did not want to start off by appearing too eager. As he went over the questions again in his mind, Martin nervously repositioned his pen, his ink, and his notebook on his desk. Finally, he heard Old Joseph’s timid knocking.
“Come in.”
“The gendarme has brought up M. Cézanne and a M. Zola. M. Zola requests to speak to you first, because he must catch a train.”
“Show him in, please.”
“Shall I stay to take notes?”
“Please.”
Martin watched his clerk leave. “A M. Zola?” What world was the old man living in? At least his antiquated greffier would not be nervous. Martin stood up in front of his desk and gave his damp hands a quick wipe on his trousers.
When Zola followed Joseph into the room, the author held out his hand and introduced himself, although there was no mistaking the pince-nez, the close, wiry mustache and beard, and the girth. It was as if he had walked out of a satirical magazine.
“Bernard Martin,” Martin said, as they shook hands. Zola’s grip was firm and dry. Before Martin had time to say more, Zola flipped his bowler onto one of the two chairs in front of the desk and walked around it to look out the window.
“You have a fine view of the square. Is there a market here any more?”
“Most Thursdays.”
“And they sell good things? Anchovies, olives, earthy things?” Zola scrutinized Martin. “Do you like those things?”
“Of course.”
“You’re not from here?”
“No, Lille.”
“Via Paris?”
“Yes.” Zola was sizing him up.
“Everyone comes via Paris. I was born there,” Zola said as he once again stared out the window, “and the people of Aix never forgave me for it. When my father died, after he had built them the best dam in all of France, the leaders of the town refused to help my mother and me. Earthy things, combined with petit bourgeois avarice under the thumb of snobbish passé aristocrats. You like it here?”
It was hard to know what to answer, so Martin remained silent.
“But, of course,” Zola worked his way around Martin toward one of the wooden witness chairs. “I am not here to interrogate you, am I? You need to know about my friend.”
“Yes.” Martin knew that once he got started he would do fine. It was clear that Zola liked to hold forth. He watched as the writer settled in, putting down his heavy walking stick, undoing the only button on his jacket that had been fastened, and, with some effort, crossing his legs. It seemed a paltry thing not to recognize who he was, and what he meant to men like Martin.
“M. Zola, I must tell you how much I admired Germinal.”
The writer’s face bu
rst into a smile. “Ah, then you are my kind of republican.” Zola took off his pince-nez and held it in his two chubby hands. “My latest project—well, I have two actually—but the one I’m worried about, is getting Germinal on the stage. I may have trouble with the censors. You know there are some government officials—including some in the police—who do not like me. It’s because I tell the truth.”
“Yes, I can see that.” Any support of the workers aroused controversy, Martin knew this only too well. “And your other project?” Martin felt it only polite to ask.
“Another in my Rougon-Macquart series, about an artist. A man who cannot create the masterpiece that he has in his mind, his problems with women, the influence of heredity and the environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Oh?” Could it be about Cézanne?
Zola paused, as if he were reading Martin’s thoughts, and then continued more slowly. “The main character is a composite of all the artists I know, of course. And I know many. As you may recall, I’ve defended much of the new art in my journalistic pieces.”
Martin did not know anything about Zola’s role in the art world. Was the writer’s talk of a “composite artist” a way of covering the tracks he had inadvertently traced? The phrase “problems with women” had certainly caught Martin’s attention.
“M. Zola, I don’t want to keep you. I understand that you have to catch a train at—”
“Noon.”
“Noon, yes. Then may I ask why you wanted to see me?”
“To offer my services, of course.”
“In what way?” Zola was so nonchalant, so sure of himself. It was obvious that Martin would have to hear the writer out before he got to the questions that he was desperate to ask.
“I thought you and I could share information. If I had the opportunity to peruse your notes, for example, maybe I’d see something in them that you don’t. I’ve done a lot of investigating. Not police work, of course. But for my novels. My whole career is dedicated to describing what makes men do what they do.”
The request to see Martin’s notes was presumptuous. “I’m sorry. No one can see my notes until I pass them on to the prosecutor,” Martin said, hoping that Joseph, who was writing away so quietly in the alcove, would also get the point. “But I see no reason why we cannot talk over some aspects of the case.”
“All right, then.” Even Zola knew that he was not likely to get away with this audacious ploy. So he tried another. “The most important thing is this: Cézanne is innocent.”
Martin was surprised, he had expected Zola to lead up to this assertion with some proof. “How do you know?”
“He is psychologically incapable of hurting anyone. He is a very sensitive man. Very loyal. In fact, in some ways much more sensitive than I. I always expected that he would have surpassed me by now because of this.”
“I’ve heard quite differently. I’ve heard that he has a very bad temper. That he throws things and tears up his canvases.” For the first time since Zola had entered the room, Martin felt he was gaining some control.
“Oh, that.” Zola waved his pince-nez. “That’s frustration with himself, his work. He keeps trying to paint what’s up here,” the author pointed to his head, “and it doesn’t come out quite that way. He sees something that he can’t quite commit to the canvas. All artists go through this. In fact, I do almost every morning when I sit down at my desk to write.”
“And, may I ask, what happens to your frustrated artist—the one in your novel—at the end?”
“Oh, it’s sad. He commits suicide.”
Anger and frustration turned against himself instead of against another human being.
“And ‘the problems with women’?”
“Oh, dear,” Zola sighed and sat back in the chair. “As soon as I said it, I knew I should not have brought it up. I’m always too eager to talk about my work. And you, you’re good. That’s what Hortense and Paul told me. A pouncer, like any examining magistrate worth his salt should be. Well, then let me tell you why Cézanne could not have killed Solange Vernet.”
Martin waited through the dramatic pause.
“He could not have killed her because he loved her. She was the love of his life.”
Surely the great portrayer of human passions knew how easily love could turn to hate. “You know that because?” Martin could hardly believe that he was challenging the great Zola.
“When we met in July, she was all that he could talk about. She understood him. She understood what he was trying to do. Hortense and all the other women had always been a burden to him. He told me that Solange Vernet could be his muse.”
Muse? Like the woman with her legs spread for the assorted men in Cézanne’s obscene painting?
“I understand that you received some letters for Cézanne in July,” said Martin, trying to move Zola from pious generalities to specifics.
“Actually, I did not. They did not come. I’m sure it was a great disappointment to him.”
“Then this love of his life may have been on the verge of rejecting him, and what would that mean to a sensitive soul given to temper tantrums?” asked Martin, pushing himself to keep pressing the famous writer.
“Not murder.” Zola’s face was grim. “Besides, I am his best friend. And I can tell you that in all confidence.”
“How?” The author, the legendary investigator, still had not offered any evidence.
“I asked him. I was quite upset by Hortense’s telegram. That’s why I came. So I had to ask. We were standing on the banks of the Arc yesterday, where we had dreamed our boyhood dreams together. For us, for our friendship, this place is almost sacred. He swore to me there, swore to me, that he did not do it. Cézanne is not capable of lying. Everything shows in his face.”
Zola’s word. That should be enough to convince a novice judge in this backwater provincial, petit-bourgeois, aristocratic-ridden town.
Martin got up, in part to relieve the tension caused by what he was about to do. In exchange for eliciting information about the artist’s past, he was going to have to reveal Solange Vernet’s secret. The only question was, how to begin. “Let me show you a few things,” Martin said to Zola, who had taken out his watch to check the time. “Perhaps you can help me with them.” He reached into his cabinet for the two small canvases that he had taken from the Jas de Bouffan.
“Did you know,” he said, as he unrolled the first of them, “that Solange Vernet had golden-red hair?”
“Yes.” Zola placed his pince-nez on his nose and rose to examine the pictures.
“This one,” Martin held down the small painting of the worshiped woman on his desk, “is this what you would consider a ‘muse’?”
Zola smiled broadly. “I remember this. It was a kind of a joke. I love the bishop standing there, being one of the ‘inspired.’” The author removed his glasses. “I’m afraid that Cézanne has grown much more pious since then. He would not do anything so iconoclastic these days. In any case, my impression is that Cézanne had a much different relationship to his Solange. I doubt if he even saw a bare shoulder. At least not from what he told me.”
“And this.” Martin rolled out the depiction of the young woman being strangled. Zola peered at it and nodded.
“They are very early. They have nothing to do with what Cézanne is painting now. He could not have known her then.”
“When do you think these were painted?”
Zola shrugged. “The late sixties. I own one from that period. A striking painting of a muscular man, almost red in appearance, carrying away a woman whose skin is so white it’s almost luminous. With dark hair, let me add. White-skinned with dark hair. Both nude, in the middle of a forbiddingly dark canvas. I call it ‘The Abduction.’ Cézanne gave it to me almost twenty years ago. He was very obsessed by the human drama then. Now he does not seem to be at all interested in showing human passions. Quite the contrary.”
Martin rolled up the canvases and set them aside. “You say he was obs
essed by the human drama in that period,” he said quietly. “Would that include rape and murder?”
“Well, as much as any of us.” Zola pursed his lips. “Even before my work, although my critics would not admit it, there was a lot of violence in the theater and serial novels.”
“Would you say that Cézanne was obsessed by violence during those years?”
“Obsessed? No.”
If Zola was here to prove Cézanne’s innocence, he was unlikely to have answered that question in the affirmative.
“Do you have anything else to show me? Any current paintings of Cézanne’s?”
Martin shook his head. He did have the quarry fragment, but that would only be a diversion. “What about his relationships with women?” he persisted.
Zola sat down again. “At that time, we were both very shy with women.”
“Would you characterize Cézanne as being afraid of them? Of having ‘problems with women’?”
Zola hesitated before answering. Martin guessed he was not thinking about whether Cézanne did have a fear of women, but, rather, what he should say about it.
“Shyness, yes. Fear may be too strong. Besides, you certainly cannot base any of these assumptions on what a man paints. I write about depravity and murder, but I would never engage in them.” Zola was trying hard to close the door he himself had opened with the description of his new novel.
“Then you do not think it unusual that a young man, as Cézanne was in those days, would paint pictures of women that show them to be either overwhelmingly powerful or cruelly overpowered?”
“No.”
Having said his piece, Zola put his pince-nez in his breast pocket and took hold of his walking stick, preparing to leave.
“I realize you are in something of a hurry,” Martin said. “But I think there is one more thing you can help me with. We must keep it between ourselves. I need to be able to question Cézanne without his being aware of it.”
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