The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne

by M. L. Longworth

“It has to be,” Pierre said. “At least it looks like one to me.”

  Verlaque looked at his friend with a raised eyebrow.

  “Doesn’t it to you?” Pierre asked. “Those blotches of color—”

  “Blotches?”

  “You know what I mean,” Pierre said.

  “Is it Mme Cézanne?” Paulik asked.

  “It doesn’t look like her,” Verlaque said. “But he did paint his wife a lot. There, I’m talking about it as if I think it’s the real thing, too.”

  “Who could identify the painting?” Paulik asked. “Other than Dr. Schultz, who’s a murder suspect. Do we take it to Paris?”

  “Let’s start here, in Aix. We don’t want to embarrass ourselves at the Musée d’Orsay cradling an obvious fake. Marine’s father can help us,” Verlaque offered.

  “Dr. Bonnet?” Pierre asked. “Aix’s favorite general practitioner knows a lot about Cézanne?”

  “Yes, an incredible amount,” Verlaque replied. “He’s self-taught, but his knowledge is impressive all the same.”

  Paulik said, “The policemen who came early this morning to finish dusting found a name and phone number jotted down on a piece of paper. Edmund Lydgate—he’s a retired Sotheby’s auctioneer with a vacation house in the Luberon.”

  “You’re kidding,” Verlaque said. “Why didn’t we find that last night?”

  “That’s a good question, and I gave the team a piece of my mind for missing it.”

  “Had René contacted him?”

  “We tried calling his number but there was no answer,” Paulik said. “Officer Schoelcher was going to keep trying.”

  Pierre looked at his watch. “I have to get back to the bookstore. Saturday is still, thankfully, a busy day for booksellers.”

  Verlaque said, “Oui, bien sûr. Salut, Pierre.”

  “À demain,” Pierre said as he headed toward the door. He stopped and then asked, “If it’s a real Cézanne, do you realize what it’s worth?”

  “Hundreds of millions,” Verlaque said. “While drinking my coffee this morning I had a quick look on the Internet.”

  “I did the same,” Paulik said. “The Card Players sold for $250 million.”

  “Who in the world—?” Pierre asked.

  “The royal family of Qatar,” Verlaque answered.

  • • •

  Anatole Bonnet had just been finishing lunch with his wife of forty-two years, Florence, when the phone rang. For a man of his age he was in good shape, as was Florence—they both biked to work and hiked on the weekends—so he was quick to get up and answer.

  “Encore à table, Papa?” Marine asked, pacing back and forth in her own kitchen in downtown Aix.

  “Just finished our yoghurts.”

  Marine smiled, glad she didn’t have to eat with her parents—at least their food. The yoghurt would have been a supermarket brand, with zero fat, and lots of sickly fruit added to it. Her parents’ weekly food budget was probably what she and Antoine spent in two days, something she felt no guilt about. Eating was something the Bonnet family did for fuel, not for pleasure, as Antoine, and even Sylvie, had taught her. Years ago Marine had shared office space, and frequently lunches, with a visiting law researcher from Seattle. While they explored Aix’s restaurants, Susan described her childhood meals, which had consisted of their family of five racing through bland dinners. Marine had nodded in agreement. “What?” Susan had asked, staring in disbelief. “Your family ate like that, too? I thought it was an American thing.”

  “Nope,” Marine had replied, stealing one of Susan’s hand-cut french fries. “Lots of French families ate like that in the seventies. Our mothers were post–World War II babies and didn’t learn to cook; they were out in the workforce, celebrating their independence from the farmhouse kitchen.”

  “As if a career can’t go hand in hand with cooking decent food.”

  “And eating it.”

  “Chérie?” her father asked.

  “Sorry, Papa,” Marine answered. “I—well, Antoine and myself—have a favor to ask. It has something to do with a case he’s working on—”

  “Murder? Need a doc’s opinion?”

  “I’ll fill you in later,” Marine said. “But I can tell you it has something to do with Cézanne. That’s why Antoine needs you to come to the Palais de Justice.”

  “I’m intrigued.”

  “I thought you would be. Can you meet us there in an hour? At three p.m.?”

  “Does Antoine need a theologian, too?” her father asked.

  “No, but thank you,” Marine answered. Florence Bonnet and Antoine Verlaque weren’t the best of friends, but Marine found it touching that her father would want her mother to come along. The Bonnets were inseparable.

  Marine said good-bye and hung up the phone, thinking of her quick conversation a half hour earlier with Verlaque. He had immediately said that he was with Bruno Paulik, a hint that he couldn’t speak intimately to Marine, but he did say, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” before telling her about a supposed Cézanne portrait that he and Bruno were taking back to Verlaque’s office. He had also suggested that she come for dinner that evening, promising to light a fire in his fireplace and cook his winter specialty, choucroute, which he picked up from an Alsatian deli around the corner from his apartment. She had agreed, intrigued by the Cézanne story and caught off guard by the call; but she was looking forward to the meal. Sauerkraut, sausage, and boiled red potatoes—accompanied by one of the stellar Rieslings that Antoine had in his cellar—were one of her big loves. She had become, despite her upbringing, une gourmande. “I’m also a pushover,” Marine mumbled to herself as she made herself a coffee. She realized that she had overreacted on Friday evening, but she still had things she wanted to discuss with Antoine. It was time.

  • • •

  “Well, one thing I’m sure about,” Anatole Bonnet said, looking down at the portrait and rubbing his chin, “it’s not Hortense, Mme Cézanne.”

  “Is it even a Cézanne?” Verlaque asked, pacing back and forth in his office.

  “I’d need to look at it longer, and have my books next to me,” Dr. Bonnet said. “But I think so, yes.”

  “I have chicken skin,” Paulik said, rubbing his muscular forearms. He adjusted the wool scarf that was twisted around his neck.

  “It’s not that cold in here,” Verlaque said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Paulik replied. “The heat works every other day in this building.”

  “I’m freezing,” Marine agreed. “Mme Cézanne always frowned, didn’t she, Papa?”

  “Almost without exception,” Dr. Bonnet replied. “And this doesn’t look like her. Mme Cézanne had straight brown hair—always tied back—a long, fine nose; a small mouth; and almond-shaped eyes. Hands clasped, like this.” Dr. Bonnet nervously folded his hands together and Marine smiled, charmed by her father. His hands had more age spots than she remembered.

  “There’s a portrait of Mme Cézanne at the d’Orsay where she looks like she’s ready to kill her husband,” Dr. Bonnet said. “And it was painted the year of their marriage—1886. That always struck me as odd.”

  Marine felt Verlaque staring at her. She looked down at the portrait and said, “This woman, whoever she is, is radiant.”

  “Yes, she’s having a good time,” Verlaque said. “Which means that the painter was having a good time, too, non?”

  “One would think that the two are related, yes,” Dr. Bonnet answered.

  “What makes you think that it’s a real Cézanne?” Paulik asked.

  “The colors, for one,” Dr. Bonnet said. “It’s full of color, even her face.”

  Marine bent down, getting as close to the canvas as possible without touching it. She said, “There are all kinds of color in her face: pink, of course, but look at those bits of green and blue. Even yellow
.” She pointed, her finger hovering about an inch above the canvas. “Yellow in her eyebrows, and at the tip of her mouth.”

  “Cézanne called them ‘sensations of color,’” Anatole Bonnet said, “like planes of color falling on top of each other. It happens in the backgrounds, too; they were just as important to him as the face. Cézanne—I mean, the painter of this canvas—has given just as much attention to the green wall behind the sitter as he does her face. That’s a Cézanne quality.”

  “You can see those Cézanne geometric forms here, too,” Verlaque said, pointing to the canvas. “The ruffled collar of her dress is just a series of cylinders.”

  “Exactement,” Marine’s father replied. “But this has something else—”

  “What?” Marine and Verlaque asked in unison.

  “Personality,” Dr. Bonnet replied. “Because Antoine’s right—Cézanne was more interested in shape and color than in the sitter. But this young woman’s personality shines through.”

  The foursome stood in silence, staring at the red-haired woman, who sat upright, laughing at the painter. She had full lips and large blue eyes, wore a simple blue blouse and skirt, and in her hands she played with a thin yellow ribbon. The chair was a wood-backed one of the sort still popular in Provence, and the wall was green with no paintings or other adornments.

  “And Cézanne usually didn’t reveal the sitter’s personality?” Paulik asked.

  “No,” Dr. Bonnet replied. “He didn’t. He never hired female models, either. Even his Bathers series he took from nude studies from the Académie Suisse in Paris, where he had studied as a young man. He was notoriously shy, especially around women.”

  “Hence all the portraits of Hortense,” Marine suggested.

  “Yes, he was married to Hortense, so there must have been an easiness between them, or a familiarity at least.”

  “Was it usual for him to sign his paintings?” Verlaque asked, pointing to the P. Cézanne written on the painting’s right-hand bottom corner.

  “No,” Dr. Bonnet said. “He rarely signed, as he was frequently unhappy with his results. And he rarely dated his works, but this one is clearly dated, ’85.”

  “As if he wanted to remember the date,” Marine said. “Like dating the back of a photograph.”

  Anatole Bonnet mumbled to himself, took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose. “His last portraits, painted in 1905 and ’06, just before his death, were of his gardener, old Vallier,” he said, folding up his hankie. “Those had more intimacy than the earlier portraits, at least for me, because you see in the old man’s face the painter’s own fear of dying, of growing old.”

  Marine looked at her father and tried to see if he felt the same fear. She had never spoken to her parents about growing old, probably because they never sat still.

  “It’s the gardener’s aged, wrinkled hands that reveal Cézanne’s old age,” he went on. “And in those paintings the paint is layered on, very thickly, like in this portrait.”

  “It’s very Rembrandtesque,” Marine said.

  “A very apt comparison,” Dr. Bonnet said, smiling. “The paintings of Vallier are very moving, like Rembrandt’s late self-portraits. But this one is joyous. And if we are to believe the date, it was painted a good twenty years before the Vallier portraits.”

  “So it’s not in his later style?” Verlaque asked.

  “Not at all,” Dr. Bonnet answered. “But there’s another mystery here, which is now giving me doubts as to the painting’s authenticity.”

  This time Verlaque, Paulik, and Marine all blurted out, “What?”

  “It’s just that Cézanne rarely painted women,” Anatole Bonnet said. “Especially young, pretty women. I can think of a portrait of a very old woman—she was probably a maid at the rue Boulegon—and the Mme Cézanne portraits, of course. And then maybe one or two others. But that’s it. It would have been very out of character for Cézanne to do a painting such as this one. He’s smitten.”

  Chapter Nine

  I Should Like to

  Astonish Paris with an Apple

  Bruno Paulik tore his brioche in two and took a bite. “You know what I don’t understand?” he asked, still chewing. “Why are art experts always so intent on attaching dates and styles to a painting? ‘This is his late style,’ or, ‘This is the blue period’—that kind of thing. How do they know? What if Cézanne just felt like slathering on the paint that day in 1885? It was a Tuesday, a sunny April day, and he felt like trying something new? What if, for once, he was in a jolly mood and just felt like having the sitter smile and laugh?”

  “Or the sitter was so comfortable with him that she laughed naturally?” Verlaque said, looking over at the red-haired woman.

  Paulik dipped a corner of his brioche into his coffee and Verlaque tried not to wince. Verlaque said, “But I think—although I get what you’re saying—that an artist as serious as Cézanne didn’t change his style on an April morning just for the fun of it. It was too risky; it took him so long to get there. Remember all those salon refusals, the bad reviews, the mocking—even in Aix?”

  “Especially here in Aix.”

  “Right,” Verlaque said, sipping his coffee.

  Paulik chewed. “Yeah, I get it. I guess he wouldn’t have had the interest, or the time, to start fooling around with another technique.”

  “By 1885 he had finally found his gift. He wouldn’t take that lightly. But—”

  “Who knows?”

  “Right—”

  “He was human,” Paulik said, holding his arms out. “We change from day to day. We get giddy, or we’re in a bad mood.”

  “Yes.” Verlaque put his cup down and stared over at the painting.

  Their musings were interrupted by a knock on the door. “Come in,” Verlaque said.

  Jules Schoelcher, a young policeman originally from Alsace, walked in and greeted his superiors with a stiff but sincere “Good afternoon.” Seeing Paulik’s half-eaten brioche, he added, “Bon appétit, sir.”

  “C’est mon goûter,” Paulik replied. “It’s five p.m., afternoon snack time all over the world.”

  “Any news on the Boulegon case?” Verlaque asked.

  “The fingerprints we’ve found in the apartment are René Rouquet’s, and a few of Dr. Schultz’s. No others,” Jules said.

  “So the man she saw was wearing gloves,” Verlaque said.

  “Or she was lying,” Paulik suggested.

  “And I got ahold of Edmund Lydgate,” Schoelcher said.

  “The retired auctioneer?” Verlaque asked.

  “Yes,” Schoelcher replied. “René Rouquet did call him, but Lydgate claims he could hardly make sense of what Rouquet was saying. They hung up not having managed to make a rendezvous. Officer Flamant checked Lydgate’s alibi; an old farmer named Elzéard Bois lives on the main road says he spoke with Lydgate Friday night. Besides, Lydgate told me he can’t drive; he had his license suspended for impaired driving.”

  “Someone else could have driven him,” Verlaque suggested. “But it seems unlikely that a retired auctioneer from a prestigious auction house would get caught up in this. What else have you got?”

  “Officer Flamant and I are going over photos of art thieves who fit the description of the man Dr. Schultz saw,” Schoelcher said.

  “And?” Verlaque asked.

  “Short, stocky, and bald fits more than half of them.”

  “As I figured,” Verlaque replied, looking at his commissioner.

  “Hey!” Paulik said as he wiped the crumbs off of the desk and put them gently into the palm of his hand.

  “You’re bald and stocky, but not short,” Verlaque said, smiling. “Are any of those guys from Aix?”

  “No,” Schoelcher replied. “One lives outside of Paris; he’s rehabilitated and has been working in trucking for years. The rest are st
ill in jail. But—”

  “Go on.”

  “It might not be an art thief, right? Just a thief who got lucky, who perhaps overheard Rouquet talking about the painting? Or found out about it somehow?”

  “Good idea,” Verlaque said. “I’ll call Pierre and ask a few more questions about Rouquet’s daily life.”

  Schoelcher turned to go and saw the canvas on Verlaque’s spare desk. “Wow,” he said, frozen. “She’s—I mean it’s—beautiful.”

  “We’re having a hard time not looking at it,” Verlaque said. “But it’s going into the vault this evening.”

  “ ‘I will astonish Paris with an apple,’ ” Schoelcher said.

  Paulik stared at the young officer and then looked at Verlaque.

  “Pardon?” Verlaque asked.

  “That’s what Cézanne said,” Schoelcher replied. “ ‘I will astonish Paris with an apple.’ ”

  • • •

  Verlaque walked down the north side of the Cours, happy he wasn’t standing in the queue in front of Michaud’s. He stopped once he was in front of the real estate agency’s windows. Lacking much of a sweet tooth, he was more enticed by glossy real estate pictures than the beautiful chocolate desserts across the street. He played an imaginary game in his head as he looked at the photographs, eliminating each house until he found his favorite. He began with locations: the Drôme, too far; Saint-Tropez, too busy and phony. He wanted rough stone, so eliminated those covered in smooth stucco. He preferred asymmetrical to symmetrical, so eliminated houses that looked too boxy. His eyes finally rested on one with an enchanting, long lane leading up to the house that was lined with alternating plane and umbrella-pine trees. The more he looked at it the more familiar it became: it was the house of Jacob, a friend in the cigar club who had announced he was moving to London, where he worked most of the week anyway. A little bell sounded as the glass doors to the agency opened and a tall, slim woman in her early seventies stuck her head out the door, smiling at him. “It’s a lovely house, isn’t it?”

  “I want it,” Verlaque said, smiling. “Antoine Verlaque.” He reached out and shook her hand.