The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne (5 page)

“René came into the bookstore yesterday,” Pierre repeated. “More agitated than he usually is. He was going on and on about how sad it was that I moved away. It was very odd, as I used to be lucky to get a hello out of him. So, René finally manages to pull me away from a customer who was having way too much trouble deciding between the new John Grisham and the new John le Carré, and he asks if there's somewhere we can talk. But with good light.”

“Bizarre,” Verlaque said.

“It gets even better,” Jean-Marc said. “Tell Antoine about René changing the locks.”

“Yes, yes,” Pierre said, waving his hands around in frustration. “I was trying to get to that.”

“Sorry, Pierre,” Jean-Marc said, getting up and taking the coffee tray into the kitchen.

Pierre shook his head back and forth, breathed in, and said, “René was as pale as a ghost and told me he wanted to have the locks on the front door changed.”

“Was his apartment broken into?” Verlaque asked.

“No,” Pierre answered. “I asked him that straightaway. But he seemed terrified and kept looking over his shoulder. So I led him into my boss's office and closed the door. It's only then that I noticed that René's carrying a plastic bag, gingerly, under his arm. Cradling it, actually. Then he asks me if I can lock the door.”

Verlaque laughed but then noticed that Pierre's face was now also ashen.

Pierre went on, “I told him I couldn't lock the door so we'd have to take our chances, as by then I had guessed that he was going to show me what was in the plastic bag.”

“Hence the good light,” Verlaque offered.

“René sat down and then grabbed my arm so strongly it almost hurt,” Pierre said. “And he said, ‘You're one of the only people I can trust with this.'”

“Even though you rarely spoke,” Verlaque suggested.

“Exactly. And then someone walked down the hall and René almost jumped into my arms.”

“Wait, wait a minute,” Verlaque stuttered, sitting forward and putting his index finger in the air. “You're not telling me that René was about to show you a Paul—”

“
Oui
.”

“I told you it was good!” Jean-Marc called from the kitchen.

•
JANUARY 6, 1885
•

M
anon Solari lifted her black cotton skirt, trying not to get its hem wet, as she stepped past her mother cleaning their front stoop. “The bells haven't begun to ring yet, Maman,” Manon said, giving her mother the
bise
. “You needn't rush.” Manon hated to see Mme Solari, who would be turning sixty-five later in the year, working so hard. M. Solari, a stonecutter, had died when he was fifty-seven, or fifty-eight; he had never been sure how old he was. His family had left Piedmont when he was a baby, and neither of his parents had ever learned to read or write in Italian, or French.

“The bells will ring soon enough,” Mme Solari replied as she threw the last of the water out into the street. “And the police will be by any minute to check if we've washed. This is a
task I'll never regret doing; you can't imagine how filthy the streets used to be, before you were born.”

Manon glanced nervously toward the south. Mme Michaud would have her head if she wasn't in the shop by 8:15 a.m. And today was the 6th of January.

“The French are filthy,” Mme Solari went on, now brushing water off their front step. She nodded to their neighbor, Mme Janot, who had just begun to wash down her front stoop as well. Manon winced, hoping that Mme Janot hadn't overheard her mother's assessment of French cleaning habits. Her mother, like her father, had come to Provence from Piedmont, as a young girl. “When I was your age the butchers would walk up and down these streets, carrying carcasses of pigs and lambs, trailing blood in their wake. Disgusting. Your father”—Mme Solari paused, making the sign of the cross—“always said that the law they passed in '50 was one of the few laws he ever agreed with.”

As if on cue, the town hall clock began to chime. “There, you see,” Mme Solari said, wiping her brow. “It's eight o'clock. You'll be late.”

Manon smiled as she usually did when her mother warned her not to be late for work, and yet it was Mme Solari's chatter that caused Manon to have to almost run to Michaud's every morning. She said good-bye once more, promising to bring her mother back any bits of broken—unsellable—cake. How her mother had made it to such a ripe old age Manon had no idea, but one of her sisters—she had five—had joked that perhaps it was Mme Solari's sweet tooth.

Almost skipping down the rue des Guerriers, Manon looked up at the clear blue January sky. She was thankful to have been born in 1855, five years after the city fathers had
ordered the citizens of Aix to stop throwing rubbish out of their windows. Her elder brother, Philippe, told her that almost anything could be found in the streets back then, especially near the tanneries. Even the nobles chucked garbage out of the windows of their grand mansions.

The Solaris were poor; Philippe, now a well-known sculptor, still had to sculpt in red clay. He couldn't afford marble. And so Manon knew she was lucky to work, even part-time, at Michaud's pâtisserie. Her sister Clara skinned rabbits to make hats; Catherine and Suzanne were
casseuses
: they each had four children so worked from home, cracking chestnuts that would be used in candy shops like Michaud's. Isabella had six children but made some money from tending her five mulberry trees that were used in silk farming. Maria—the lucky one, Mme Solari always said—was a nun.

Being the youngest of the seven Solari children, Manon had always been pampered. She was their red-haired baby. By the time she was ten, her parents were too tired to look after her, but it seemed that there had always been a sibling available to take her on walks. Their small house was at the north end of the rue des Guerriers, and from there it was a short walk, through the massive town gates, north along the rue Pasteur, out to the countryside. Collecting wild plants and flowers had been (and still was, when she managed it) Manon's favorite pastime. She couldn't wait for spring.

As she got closer to the place de l'Hôtel de Ville she could hear people chattering, horses braying, and water splashing from the square's fountain. The town hall was here, where her siblings had all been married by the mayor (except Maria, of course) before heading off to their church ceremonies. It was Manon's favorite spot in Aix, and if she had the money she
would live here and not in the more fashionable Quartier Mazarin. She loved the colorful houses that surrounded the west side of the square—colors she knew, although she had never been outside of Aix, came from Italian buildings: ochre, red, orange, and yellow.

Manon smiled, remembering Philippe chattering on and on about the square's sculptures, most of them carved by Chastel. She walked up to the fountain and looked at a frowning, bearded stone man, spouting water from his mouth. Philippe was inspired by Chastel and used to run his fingers along the sculpture's wrinkled forehead whenever they passed by. “To think that Chastel was ruined by the revolution!” Philippe had cried to his younger sister. “He died in a poorhouse in 1793.”

Manon, then eight, looked up at her big brother. “Did they kill him?”

“Not as such, no,” he replied, looking up at Chastel's masterpiece above the Halles aux Grains and taking his sister's small hand in his. “They killed his clients.”

Manon, now no longer a child but a woman of thirty, looked up at the grain hall and at Chastel's massive sculpture representing the Durance (a woman) and the Rhône (a man). She loved how the woman's leg dangled out over the pediment, like the Durance bursting its banks as it often did in spring. But Manon thought her too mannish—too muscular. She had tried to appreciate sculpture, and despite the fact that Philippe had studied sculpture in Paris and that her father had been
marrié à la pierre
, it was just not her preferred art. She loved color, and painting. Philippe had taken her, many times, to the Musée Granet to look at the paintings; he knew the museum's keeper from his days as an art student, and they never had to pay the entry fee. But now, with working and looking after her
mother, Manon rarely had the time to go. And if she had to choose between the museum and the countryside, she would choose the latter.

Manon hummed as she picked up speed and continued walking toward the Cours; her father had refused to call Aix's grand main street by its new name—Mirabeau—and so she did, too. “It will always be the Cours à Carrosses for me,” he used to say, as if the avenue's personality had been changed with the new name. Manon grinned, thinking of her father banging their aged wooden kitchen table with his massive fist, a fist that she would always remember being covered in a fine dusting of limestone powder.

When she was five years old, gaslights replaced the town's olive oil lights, and M. Solari railed against that, too. Manon imagined that her father had these opinions because it made him feel more Aixois and less an immigrant. As Philippe regularly reminded her, feeling like a real Aixois wasn't an easy thing. Even Philippe's friend Émile, now a famous writer living in Paris, and who had spent part of his youth in Aix, said he felt like an outcast in Aix because of his Parisian accent and an outcast in Paris because of his new Provençal twang. When Manon's fiancé, Jean-Auguste, died, M. Zola had come down from Paris and bought her not flowers, even though she loved them, but instead a book of the wild flowers of Provence. She would never forget that act of kindness. Manon secretly thought that the writer's lisp might have had more to do with his being ostracized as a young boy rather than with his accent, but of course she didn't say anything. And she liked his lisp, for she too had a blemish: a scarred face, the gift of a bout of measles.

After Jean-Auguste's death, Manon made a decision to
avoid courters—not that there were many in Aix—and stay at home to take care of her parents. She hadn't been looking forward to marriage—it was something she just sort of fell into; before she knew it, after having gone on a dozen or so walks with Jean-Auguste, they were engaged and everyone was celebrating. Jean-Auguste had been a nice man, a stonecutter like her father, and she felt awful that he had died so young. But she didn't miss him.

Whether it was grand or an imposter, as her father had called it—a street for those who just wanted to be seen—the Cours wasn't yet paved, even though her humble street in the Bourg Saint Sauveur was. Manon hated having to walk across the Cours, dodging who knows what, including horses and handcarts, to get to Michaud's at number 8. She sighed when she saw the queue and felt bad that she hadn't made an effort to come to the shop earlier than usual, even though she always started at 8:15. When she opened the door and squeezed by the crowd, she heard Mme Michaud's voice booming from the front counter, and she remembered why she hadn't come earlier: she wouldn't have been thanked, or paid. Mme Michaud's fat daughter Amandine was at her side, trying to disguise the fact that she had something sweet in her mouth and was slowly trying to chew. To give her credit, it had been Amandine who suggested that the shop bake the Parisian-style of galettes des rois, made from almond paste with a buttery, flaky pastry, as opposed to the Provençal version of a ring of brioche covered in
fruits confits
. The almond-paste cakes had become the better seller, and when Manon had told Philippe (who couldn't afford to eat either cake, unless his friends Émile or Paul bought one for him), he said that it was probably due more to fashion than taste. The Aixois always wanted to be Parisian.

Manon went into the back room and washed her hands in the basin and checked her hair—which she tied up in a bun for working at Michaud's—in a small cracked, cloudy mirror. “It's nice to see you, Manon,” said Suzette, her best friend, who had just rushed in and squeezed Manon's hand.

“Suzette!” Mme Michaud cried from the front room. “Please hurry up with those boxes!”

Manon and Suzette exchanged looks; both, despite the fact that they were each among the eldest of the salesgirls, were terrified of Mme Michaud, who had the power, and capability, to fire anyone at a moment's notice. Both of Suzette's parents were dead, and she struggled to support her two younger brothers. Manon quickly tied her apron behind her back and walked out into the main room, taking her spot behind the glass-fronted counter, beside Amandine. Amandine, now with a different bonbon pressing against her left cheek, leaned into Manon and whispered, “What is the date today?”

Manon stood her ground and replied, “
La Fête des Rois. Le 6 janvier
.”

“Exactly,” Amandine hissed. “You should have been here early.”

“I'm paid to come in at 8:15, every day,” Manon replied. “Hello, good sir,” she continued, smiling at a customer and turning away from Amandine.

The customer asked for a traditional brioche-style galette, and she took the one he had pointed to and set it in a red box, tying it closed with Michaud's precious gold ribbon. They had been taught to use the silk ribbon sparingly; Manon sometimes gathered small pieces off the floor and slipped them into her pocket. She used those bits to give to her nieces, for their hair, or she sometimes used them to decorate homemade gifts she
made for her mother and sisters. Once, she even found a long piece, discarded, on the paving stones outside the shop. That one she kept in her pocket all the time.

Carefully writing the price, 1.5 francs, on a slip of paper that would be turned over and reused, she gave it to the customer to take to the elaborately carved wooden front desk where Mme Michaud rang in the sales. Manon was grateful that she could read and write; Philippe and Émile had taught her. It had also been Philippe who bought her a black dress to wear to her interview with Mme Michaud; black cotton, along with a white smock that the pâtisserie provided, was the uniform. Suzette had borrowed a dress from an aunt and had worn it every day for almost a year until she had earned enough money to buy her own.

By 9:00 a.m. the bell attached to Michaud's front door rang incessantly. “Why don't they hang that bloody bell up, today of all days?” Suzette whispered in Manon's ear as she rushed by carrying three boxes of galettes for La Baronne de Montille.

“Because it reminds Madame of how much money she will make today,” replied Clara, a fellow salesgirl, who had overheard.

Manon looked worriedly at Amandine, who was serving a well-known judge's wife. Amandine hadn't seemed to have heard. Manon would remind Clara on break—if they managed to get one today—not to speak so loudly. Manon didn't like the way the other girls gossiped or made fun of Mme Michaud, as hadn't her husband died of a heart attack, just as Manon's father had? Money didn't make grieving any easier.

Manon busied herself with wrapping two galettes and snuck a look at the judge's wife. The staff at Michaud's took
pride in the fact that many women came to select and buy their own cakes instead of sending the maids to do so. Shopping at Michaud's was a pleasurable outing, one that the staff strived to uphold. The judge's wife was tall—rare in Provence—and she smiled naturally at Amandine. Her face was freckled, and her green eyes shone. She seemed to see that Manon was looking at her and she bowed slightly, and smiled even more. Flustered, Manon quickly wrapped ribbons around the boxes and wrote the prices down, handing them to her customer: Mme Frédéric, the very demanding priests' housekeeper at Saint Jean de Malte.