Free Lisette's List by Susan Vreeland Page B

you sit on that pine bench over there.”
    “Or on André’s toilet seat.”
    “He told me about the poet Frédéric Mistral’s Félibrige movement to restore and honor Provençal crafts and traditions and language, and he gave me a copy of Letters from My Mill , by Alphonse Daudet, a true son of Provence. You should read it.
    “All the while, he couldn’t stand still. One after another, he pulled out unframed landscapes done around Aix showing a pattern of vineyards and orchards and pale ocre de Ru wheat fields alternating with green rectangles, often with Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the background, thrusting up like a pyramid. ‘My rock of a thousand challenges,’ he called it. ‘The queen of mountains.’ He said its roots dig down beneath civilization. He even called it his Mount Sinai.
    “There were also paintings of pigeonniers , those round towers for roosting pigeons.”
    Pascal consulted his notes. “ ‘Look! Look here,’ Cézanne says. ‘This pigeonnier is Provence, man and nature in harmony. Paris dealers don’t understand. They insult me. Why shouldn’t I paint what is important here? Pigeon droppings are used as fertilizer. What a thing to paint, they say, but from pigeon shit come apples, pears, grapes, the delectable fruits and wines of Provence. And who doesn’t love a good salmis , all its juices and herbs of the countryside mixing in a delicious pigeon ragout, eh? Pigeonniers are far more important in Provence than decrepit castles. Cabanons are too.’
    “He showed me some paintings with stark, narrow cabins made of stone, one room stacked on one room. You’ve seen them isolated in fields and pastures. Farmers and shepherds use them from time to time. ‘Who will give us back our cabanons ,’ he says, ‘when the big farms move in and tear them down for another two rows of apple trees?’
    “I was afraid he was working himself into a fit of rage, so I tried to calm him. ‘Eh, bieng , you paint them to preserve them.’
    “ ‘It’s something I can do,’ he says. ‘Frédéric Mistral can compose a poem about cigales . Daudet can write a story of his windmill. I can paint cabanons and pigeonniers and toupins . I want to die painting them. To die painting. Do you understand? I do nothing but work, but the evidence, la réalisation , I don’t see it. I go to mass, I go to vespers, but I don’t see it.’
    “His voice turned sad. He pulled out paintings of blocklike ochre rocks and cut cliffs of a quarry, one after another.
    “ ‘The Bibémus quarry near here,’ he says. ‘I painted it from the upper story of a cabanon I rented. Without it being right there in a field, I would not have been able to get this view. But dealers don’t like quarries. They aren’t pretty like the Impressionists’ picnics. They don’t understand their importance.’
    “ ‘But Julien Tanguy understood?’
    “ ‘The only one. He saw what I did, that I painted the earth’s structure manipulated by man, yet all in harmony.’
    “And with that I asked how many frames I should make for the quarry painting with Montagne Sainte-Victoire in the background.”
    Pascal gazed at it steadily, his chest heaving, as though he were a quarryman resting from swinging a pickax. Perhaps he was drawing from the painting the substance of his soul. I envied that, finding a painting that could depict one’s own soul.
    “Think of the shame of it, Lisette. That town below his studio, it knew nothing of how he struggled, day after day, working in a frenzy, draining himself with the effort to honor Provence. They didn’t even know he was there! A native son! There’s more to tell about him, but I feel fatigué . Tomorrow. Can you wait until tomorrow?”
    “Yes, I can wait.”
    He asked me to prepare daube for him on Saturday. His voice was pleading, almost like the whine of a child. I had to ask him what it was.
    “A traditional Provençal dish, sort of a beef ragout simmered with red wine. It has orange peel