The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne

by M. L. Longworth

  “Exactly,” Sylvie agreed.

  “It was windier back then,” Anatole said, “according to Amandine’s notes. More days of mistral.”

  “Climate change,” Florence said, tapping her pencil on the table.

  Marine looked at the blue sky and the sun streaming in her dining room’s large window. From here she could see the tops of the enormous bare plane trees that filled the shared gardens down below, and across to rears of the buildings that were on the rue Cardinale. This view hadn’t changed much since Amandine’s time, she thought. Saint Jean de Malte’s spire was still here, separated from her top-floor apartment by the garden and a row of red-tile rooftops. A dozen or so illegally constructed balconies and terraces, including her own, had been built in the later half of the twentieth century, and the plastic, wood, or wrought-iron (in her case) furniture that sat out on those balconies brought the image back into the modern era. As did, of course, the satellite dishes and telephone wires. And her mother’s voice.

  “Marine?”

  “Oh oui, Maman,” she answered.

  “Earth to Marine,” Sylvie said, smiling.

  “So, I’ve jotted down the names of women whom I think are other shopgirls,” Marine said, looking at her notes. “Clara comes up a few times.”

  “Ditto,” Sylvie said. “Clara seems to be a whiner.”

  “Yes!” Anatole agreed. “Amadine writes, and I quote, ‘Clara is always complaining about her sore back.’ ”

  “I’ve got some references to a Manon,” Mme Bonnet said.

  “Me, too,” Marine added. “She comes in late on the sixth of January.”

  “Fête des Rois,” Anatole said. “That would be a busy day at Michaud’s.”

  “Some things never change,” Sylvie said.

  “In my notebook Amandine says that Manon is a poker face,” Florence said. “Do you think that could mean—”

  “Perhaps,” Anatole said, pausing. “She might be referring to this girl Manon being sad, or angry, but it could refer to a skin imperfection . . .”

  “Suzette, anyone?” Sylvie asked. “Amandine says of Suzette, quote, ‘Poor orphan girl . . .’ ”

  “I didn’t find any Suzette references,” Marine said. “There’s a funny mention of the wedding cortège of Countess Émilie de Saporta passing by Michaud’s.”

  “I found a reference to a Mme Frédéric buying cakes for the priests,” Florence said. “But it hardly seems that Cézanne would have an affair with the priests’ housekeeper.”

  “Stanger things have happened,” Sylvie said, winking.

  “Mais non!” Florence tried to argue.

  “Amandine certainly loves her job,” Anatole quickly said. “The lists, and tastes, and even textures of their cakes and candies are described with such detail—”

  “Yes!” Marine agreed. “Even lovingly described.” She carefully turned one of the delicate pages of Amandine’s notebook and read aloud: “ ‘Michel’—that must have been the baker, the current Mme Michaud’s father—‘has had the idea to add the zest of precious, plump grapefruit to our calissons.’ ”

  “Lovely,” Anatole said. “I’ve marked a passage—where is it; oh, here—where Amandine writes of ‘chantilly whipped like a cloud,’ and ‘sunshine-yellow butter.’ ”

  “There’s a passage where she writes of caramels,” Sylvie said. “And she says, quote, ‘There’s nothing quite like the smell of thick cream and sizzling butter, bubbling away in Michel’s favorite copper pot.’ ”

  “She could have been a food writer,” Marine said, smiling.

  “Or a professional cook,” Sylvie said.

  “Of course, as a woman, she never would have been allowed to,” Florence said.

  “Absolutely,” Sylvie agreed. “Even today there are few female chefs in professional kitchens.”

  “It’s sad, thinking of Amandine’s life,” Anatole said, setting down his reading glasses. “Here is a woman with a passion, but she has to amuse herself by ordering supplies—”

  “And watching other peoples’ weddings pass by,” Sylvie said.

  “On that sad note,” Marine said, “I took the liberty of buying some candies at Michaud’s on my way home from school.” She got up and opened a drawer in the buffet and pulled out two small bags.

  “Research!” Anatole said, rubbing his hands together.

  “Caramels,” Marine said. “And candied lemons.”

  • • •

  Verlaque and Rebecca sat across from each other, both being careful not to touch the other’s knees. Officer Morice sat beside Verlaque; the seat opposite him was mercifully free, so the pillowcase and its contents lay there, reminding Verlaque of all he had to do when he got back to Aix.

  Rebecca looked out of the window and then said, “We should have a fast train on the East Coast. Connecting NYC and Washington to Boston.”

  “We’re lucky here,” Verlaque answered. “And as many times as I take this ride, it’s never boring.” They spoke in English, as if, unconsciously, they had decided to be secret, so that Officer Morice wouldn’t understand. The policeman flipped through a TGV magazine, pretending to read an article about Bordeaux, but he was listening to every word. He had taught himself English watching Clint Eastwood movies.

  “Unless it’s at night,” she said. “Then there’s no view.”

  He laughed. “You’re right. My favorite part is exactly half-way to Aix: Burgundy.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Rolling hills and vineyards.”

  “And cows. I like cows.”

  She looked at his eyes again. In Aix she had been frightened of their blackness, but in Paris they had turned wet, and sad. Cow eyes, she thought.

  “If the painting is really a Cézanne,” Verlaque said, “you know it has to be turned over to the state. Rouquet had no living relatives.” He thought of his dinner conversation with his father, and Enrique’s stolen eagle, stolen for honor, prestige, not money.

  “I know,” she answered. “I wasn’t planning on stealing it. I just wanted to be with it . . . her . . . for a while.”

  “Who is she?”

  Rebecca leaned forward, putting her forearms on the small white table that separated them. “I have it narrowed down to a few possibilities. Cézanne was nervous around women, right?”

  “That’s what everyone says.”

  “I think he would have been introduced to this mysterious Aixoise somehow,” she explained. “He wouldn’t have met her in a café, say, or in the park. He would have needed an excuse to strike up a conversation with her.”

  “A maid?” Verlaque asked. “That’s someone he would have seen every day, and felt comfortable around the working classes, non?”

  “That’s a good guess,” she replied, “and I’ve gone that route, too. But he was a thinking man, and unhappy with Hortense, so I think his mistress would have understood him, and his art.”

  “Sounds like a good theory. A fellow painter?”

  Rebecca shook her head back and forth. “There were very few female painters back then, and they were all in Paris, not Aix. Besides, Berthe Morisot was already the mistress of Manet.”

  “Really?” he asked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s common knowledge,” Rebecca said. “At least we’re 99 percent sure.” She smiled. “No, I think our sitter was a sister of a friend. Cézanne was incredibly loyal to his buddies. Zola was an only child, but Jean-Baptistin Baille and Philippe Solari, both solid friends, and both from Aix, had sisters. Baille, Zola, and Cézanne called themselves the Inseparables.”

  “Sounds like the title of a Hollywood movie.”

  Rebecca laughed. “But my bet is on Solari. He was a sculptor, and had six sisters. So they would have grown up with an artist brother. Like Cézanne, Solari died in 1906, also of pneumonia, but unlike Cézanne, he died a pauper. On
his way to the hospital he muttered, ‘What a pity about the weather.’”

  Verlaque thought about his mother, and wondered if she were dying. “Why is her identity so important to you?” Verlaque asked.

  “Oh, for many reasons,” she said. “I’m sure it’s partly because I always feel like I have to prove myself to my colleagues.”

  “Because you grew up wealthy?” he asked, thinking of his own personal history.

  “Not wealthy,” she corrected, “but surrounded by priceless art. And then I go and get my doctorate in art history, so colleagues mumble—I know they do—about how lucky I was growing up.”

  “So by identifying Cézanne’s mistress—”

  “I prove myself, yes.”

  “But you couldn’t have imagined that Cézanne painted her,” Verlaque said, trying to go over the events of the evening of René Rouquet’s murder in his head.

  Now you’re getting somewhere with all your questioning, thought Officer Morice as he turned a page of the magazine.

  “I had fantasized about that,” Rebecca said. “And when I saw how nervous M. Rouquet was whenever I said the year 1885 . . .” Her voice trailed off and she looked out of the window, then at her watch. “Almost in Burgundy.”

  Verlaque’s cell phone rang and he answered it, trying to whisper. Cell phone conversations were forbidden in the train’s cars, but he didn’t want to have to squeeze past the policeman to go out into the hallway to speak. “Oui, Marine,” he said. “Ça va?”

  “We’re taking a break from going over all of those notebooks that Mme Michaud loaned to us,” she said, “the ones I told you about this morning on my way to class.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Not yet,” she answered. “But we have some possibilities. But listen, there’s something more important. On our break, my father and I have been going over some of the aspects of this case, and the various people involved. Just answer yes or no, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Verlaque could hear her say, “Oui, Papa, oui!” “Are you sitting across from Dr. Schultz?” she asked, trying to stay calm.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the case of Martin Guerre?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what my father and I have been talking about,” Marine said.

  “Martin Guerre or Gérard Depardieu?”

  “Antoine! Yes or no only!” She went on, hurriedly, “Martin Guerre was an imposter.”

  “Yes . . .” He looked up at Rebecca Schultz, who was now leaning back in her seat with her eyes closed.

  “Antoine, Anatole Bonnet here,” Marine’s father said. Verlaque could hear Marine protesting in the background. “This is very important,” the doctor said. “We’ve been duped by an imposter.”

  “Yes,” Verlaque answered.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Le Fou Is Identified

  Marine grabbed the phone back. “Antoine,” she said, “I wanted you to only reply yes or no because I’m still not sure of Dr. Schultz’s honesty. But it’s Edmund Lydgate we’re talking about. It’s been bothering us how little he actually looked at the painting.”

  “Yes.”

  “You, too, right?”

  “Yes.” He remembered that Rebecca hadn’t been impressed by Lydgate’s art knowledge.

  “Good. My father and I had been going over what Lydgate said about the painting, and it was all very vague, and in fact Lydgate kept agreeing to everything Papa said, using Papa’s knowledge to make it sound like he was the expert. So we’ve been looking up images of Lydgate on the Internet. There are very few, only two rather blurry ones, both of Lydgate officiating at auctions. He sort of looks like the man we met in Gordes, although in these photos he’s not wearing a moustache. But what’s really important, more than what he looks like, is the fact that Edmund Lydgate is in a New York hospital. He just had his appendix out.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” Marine said proudly. Verlaque could hear people clapping in the background. “I phoned his apartment in New York,” she continued. “His number was listed! Using my best English—”

  Verlaque then heard Sylvie laughing.

  “I spoke to his great-niece—she’s a student at NYU so lives with him. She’s lovely; we had a nice chat. She told me that Edmund had an emergency appendectomy last week and is still recovering in the hospital. There’s no way that man we met in Gordes is Edmund Lydgate. I’ve called Bruno and told him everything. He said that he’s picking you up at the station, but he’s sent some other officers up to Gordes.”

  Verlaque once again heard clapping in the background.

  “That brings me to the motorcycle man you told me about,” Marine said. “Our imposter must have an accomplice, as I can’t imagine the man we met in the Luberon being an ace motorcycle driver.”

  “No.” He once again thought of Pierre. But how could they possibly know each other? Or did they make a deal after they met that first night at René’s? He had been so busy he hadn’t had time to go over the notes he had taken when talking with Mme Chazeau. Pierre hadn’t told him about the argument with René.

  Marine asked, “So is Rebecca Schultz his accomplice, and did she just make up that story about the motorcycle? Or is there a third person in all of this?”

  Verlaque looked over at Rebecca, who had fallen asleep. But he had seen the motorcycle following them. But was it the motorcycle man? Had they been hysterical over nothing? It might have been someone paid by Rebecca to follow them, or even a random Parisian. Thousands of people drive motorcycles in Paris.

  “I’ll leave you with that thought,” Marine said. “And I’ll see you later. I love you.”

  “Yes,” he answered once again before setting his phone down.

  They were now zipping through Burgundy, where every village seemed to have a Romanesque church, surrounded by roughly hewn stone houses that hadn’t been garishly renovated as many had in Provence. The vineyards that stretched out over hills and held his favorite grapes—Pinot Noir and Chardonnay—were dormant, but the sun was shining on them.

  • • •

  “I have two more hours before I have to pick Charlotte up at her drama class,” Sylvie said.

  “Okay, let’s get back to work,” Marine said. She cleared up the teapot and cups they had used during their break; she didn’t want the notebooks to be anywhere near liquids, or food. By the time she got back from the kitchen, her parents and Sylvie were hovered over their notebooks: Sylvie with one hand under her chin, the other hand playing with her hair; her father leaning on the table with his elbows; and her mother, back straight, hands on her lap, staring over the book. They stayed like that for almost thirty minutes, the only noise the gentle turning of the frail pages, until Sylvie said, “This is the second reference I’ve come across to Baronne de Montille.” She wrote the baronne’s name down on the sheet of paper beside her.

  Anatole Bonnet frowned. “No,” he said. “I don’t imagine Cézanne ever having an affair with a noble.”

  “We keep saying ‘affair,’” Marine said, setting down her pencil. “This was Provence in the nineteenth century. Who says they actually slept together?”

  “He was an artist,” Sylvie argued.

  “He was Cézanne,” Marine countered. “Not Manet. And certainly not Picasso. And his sitter probably had the fear of God instilled in her. This wasn’t Paris; it was tiny, backwater Aix. The Provençaux were very pious.”

  “I agree,” Anatole Bonnet said. “Cézanne was interested in ideas; perhaps this woman shared those. Perhaps that was enough to base a relationship on; that’s all there was.”

  “But Cézanne was devastated after the affair,” Sylvie went on. “He says so in his letters—”

  “Here’s something,” Florence said. “Quote, ‘I paid Manon 4 francs for her perfume. Lavender.’”

 
“Now, that’s interesting,” Anatole said.

  “What’s a Buddha’s Hand?” Sylvie asked. “She mentions it a few times. Here she says, ‘Michel bought five Buddha’s Hands.’”

  “Un citron,” Anatole said. “A funny, knobby, elongated lemon.”

  “He would have used them for making candied lemon,” Florence added. “I think they still do.”

  “Ah!” Marine said, picking up her pencil. “Amandine writes here, ‘M now selling another scent. Verbena.’ That must be Manon again.”

  “Enterprising Manon,” Sylvie said. “I wonder if she made the perfumes herself.”

  “That suits Cézanne, doesn’t it?” Marine asked. “Especially if Manon was collecting the plants and making the scents on her own. It’s like what Papa was just saying; their relationship may have been platonic, based on ideas, or common interests.”

  “Listen,” Florence said. “ ‘I caught Suzette sneaking a brioche. She said it was for her brothers. I let her have it; it was a day old.’”

  “That’s heartbreaking,” Marine said, “Suzette was the orphan.”

  “Could it be Suzette?” Anatole asked.

  “I’ll write down Suzette and Manon,” Marine said.

  “Who’s Le Fou?” Sylvie asked. “Amandine writes that he bought two galettes des rois, without boxes. Why note that detail about the boxes?”

  “Saved the bakery money,” Marine suggested. “Mme Michaud said what a good business head Amandine had. And Le Fou could be someone like Cézanne; everyone thought he was crazy.”

  “Or it could just be a crazy person,” Florence suggested.

  “But a crazy guy off the street couldn’t afford two cakes at Michaud’s,” Marine pointed out.

  “You’re right,” her mother said. “He’d have to be a rich fou.”

  “Like Cézanne,” Anatole said.

  Sylvie stood up and stretched, then touched her toes. “That’s a good idea, Sylvie,” Florence said. She got up and did the same, while Marine and her father kept reading.

  “Whoa!” Marine said, jumping up a few minutes later. “Listen to this everyone: ‘Manon and Le Fou meeting outside the shop. Secret RDV???’ And Amandine’s added two hearts in the margin.”