Free The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne by M. L. Longworth Page B

who didn’t tease her when she tripped over her own feet as she gazed around and counted the cypress trees in front of each house, or noticed that the family at number 9 had painted their shutters a brighter blue. When she was younger she had worried that her curiosity of the natural and man-made world might make her mad. But the more she read—Philippe still took her to the public library in the Hôtel de Ville—she noticed that the poets and writers and artists she read about were concerned with the same things. So she stopped worrying. Besides, she was thirty years old now, and as Clara had pointed out to Mme Solari in a not-so-quiet whisper, Manon was “over the hill” and would never marry. So she was free. Free to go on walks, to examine flowers, to run her fingers over Aix’s sculptures whenever she pleased. And if people thought she was mad, it didn’t matter, because she was too old for any young man to care. And what Isabella told her about passing the age of twenty-five was true. “You’ll see,” Isabella had said, leaning over toward her youngest sister during one of their noisy family dinners. “No one looks at you after twenty-five. You become invisible.”
    Before she knew it, Manon was in the middle of the countryside, walking through a row of vines, looking up at the sky and Mont Sainte Victoire in the distance. She waved to thevineyard’s owner, whom she often saw. He waved back and went on pruning. She smelled smoke and saw that he was burning vine branches in a neat pile at the end of one of the rows. She walked on, then, so as not to smell the smoke while she ate. She quickly walked through a small forest; she didn’t like forests, even in the hot summer. They oppressed her, and there was no view. Only in the fall and early winter, when she looked for mushrooms with Philippe and her brothers-in-law, did she enjoy them. When she stepped through the forest, she stopped and squinted, putting her hand up to her forehead to see better, and then she saw him, only two meters away, painting furiously.
    He turned quickly around and was about to complain when he saw Philippe’s youngest sister.
    â€œMonsieur Cézanne. I’m sorry to disturb you,” Manon quickly said, turning to go.
    â€œPerhaps I’m the one disturbing you,” Cézanne replied.
    Manon tried to smile but she was almost too nervous to reply. Here was Paul Cézanne, who had shown his pictures in Paris. And the Cézanne family was infamous; the father had begun his career selling hats and then had bought a bankrupt bank. Philippe told her that the Cézannes, despite their new wealth, would never be accepted by the Aixois nobility, but Manon was still in awe. And Paul Cézanne was almost as gruff as his father.
    â€œI’m only out walking, M. Cézanne.”
    â€œBut Mlle Solari, you walk with a book,” Cézanne said, gesturing to her hand with his paintbrush.
    Manon looked down at her wild flower guide; she had taken it out when walking through the vines to identify a small blue flower that grew in the rocky red soil. She was about to reply when she looked ahead and saw the view, and was mesmerizedby it: Mont Sainte Victoire shimmered, surrounded by a clear bright-blue sky. A peasant’s
cabanon
—built in rough stone, a red-tile roof, and perfectly proportioned—sat proudly in a field in the distance. But what so impressed her was the giant umbrella pine in the middle of the foreground. It was as majestic as the mountain itself.
    â€œI can see why you’re painting this,” she said, almost in a whisper.
    He stepped back from the canvas and Manon saw this as a cue that she could look at his painting. Philippe had described his friend’s art to her, paintings that she knew only a few people liked. At first she saw only patches of color, but as she studied it more she saw the mountain, in gray and white and even pink shades, and