Cezanne Road

By Bernard Martoia

Although the twenty-seat transit bus was adapted to the narrow and winding Cezanne Road, an oppressive silence smothered small talk inside the cabin after crossing the town’s limit. Every passenger could not help but monitor the bus’s progression above the ravines.

Regardless of the danger requiring his undivided attention, the bus driver gave the safety rules a short shrift. He started a guessing game with the passenger in the front seat.

“Do you see that house with a crescent-shaped swimming pool?” the driver asked the pedestrian. The stylish villa was bedecked with varnished tiles. It was built on a red mesa and offered an astounding view of the Arc Valley with the Sainte Victoire Range in the background.

“Very nice, but perhaps. …,” stammered the pedestrian, who could not finish his sentence. Driven by survival instinct, he unintentionally grabbed the safety bar when the bus neared the void.

 “Any idea of its value?” cut in the relaxed bus driver with a beguiling tone.

“Half a million euros,” answered evasively the pedestrian, who had no the faintest idea about the real estate market.

Far from being discouraged by the low estimate of someone not in the know, the snappy bus driver gave the pedestrian an indulgent smile and spurred him to give another figure.

“One million!” bid the pedestrian, hoping to be left alone. The hilarious bus driver answered negatively but with an invitation to pursue the quiz. His clicking laugh sounded like a typewriting machine in action.

The guessing game was interrupted when a car from the opposite direction was loosely parked alongside the cliff. There was not enough room for the bus to go through. In addition, the lack of railing did not help. The maneuver looked like playing Russian roulette for the uninitiated.

The breezy bus driver beckoned to the lazy driver to park his vehicle closer to the red bluff with an eager gesture of his fleshy hand. After the car driver complied with the traffic regulations, the chauffeur steered the bus, checking three mirrors by turns. Fretful passengers synchronously turned their heads toward the abyss. They caught their breath until the no-room-for-error passing was accomplished.

As if nothing had happened, the unfazed bus driver rode his hobby horse afresh. “This house is special,” he announced with a respectful gesture toward a low-slung house sporting an inviting front porch.“How much would you pay for this one?” he added like a bidder salivating at an auction.

“So here we go again!” thought the despondent pedestrian. “One or two million,” he answered half-heartedly, to be left in peace. His chief difficulty was that he could not understand why people were besotted with expensive houses they would never own. The bus driver was trying to be someone he was not. The cheapest property in that breathtaking landscape was beyond his reach.

“Malarkey! This house is worth about three million euros,” avouched the conceited bus driver. In order to drive a nail in the matter, he banged onto the steering wheel with his tubby palms.

 “Why is he infatuated with that residential area?” the pedestrian asked himself. In his excitation to uncover the motive, his right hand brushed the briefcase involuntarily. The pleasant touch of the leather spurred him to examine it. “A gold-plate combination locker is the trademark of a person handling confidential documents,” deduced the surprised passenger.

Apart from that oddity, the bus driver did not betray the slightest sign of wealth. His clothes were drab and no-frills, and his casual shoes were worn out. His rumpled shirt bulged out over the belt of his trousers as if it were not enough.

After intense cogitation, a zany explanation germinated in the pedestrian’s upper story. “The bus driver has won a grand lottery prize, and the pay-to-bearer receipt is inside the locked briefcase,” he speculated while scratching his skin below the chin level. “He will cash it at a remote place to protect his anonymity,” he concluded while trying to put himself in the chauffeur’s shoes.

While the materialistic bus driver devoted his energy to tracing remarkable properties alongside Cezanne Road, the pedestrian felt spacey when the bus crossed a bridge over La Torse Creek.

The nondescript place had been the theater of a gigantic battle that opposed six Roman legions, commanded by Gaius Marius, to a large coalition of Teutons and Ambrones led by King Teutebod in 102 BC.

The Teutonic tribe was a well-known disruptive foe contained somehow by the Rhine River. On the other hand, the Ambrones went under the radar. This tribe came from far away. It occupied Jutland, the level peninsula in Denmark nowadays. The sea level rose with global warming, and the brackish water turned the soil infertile. The livestock was decimated when the heath disappeared. The tribe retained no other option than going south to survive.

The sea level was higher when the world’s population was estimated at 200 million in the first century before Christ. This brief historical reminder challenged the anthropogenic theory that harped on catastrophic scenarios.

A Roman army erected a fortified camp on the Bibemus plateau, where the artist Paul Cezanne would rent a cabin twenty centuries later.

According to the historian Titus Livius, an uninterrupted flow of Barbarians pranced before the entrenched camp for six consecutive days. What could six Roman legions do against such a massive inflow? A legion was composed of 5,200 infantrymen and 300 cavalrymen. Sources estimated that King Teutebod commanded a coalition of circa 150,000 warriors.

The disproportionate ratio of the forces at work – one Romain against five Barbarians – galvanized the invaders. While passing before the fortifications, the Barbarians taunted the entrenched Romans. They asked if they had anything to report to their spouses in Italy. In their high expectations, it was a done deal that they would curry favor with them.

General Gaius Marius was impervious to the clamor. He was locked inside his tent, where he feverishly drew battle maps. He kept in mind a crushing defeat that occurred three years earlier. Cimbri and Teutonic tribes trounced two uncooperative Roman armies at the Battle of Arausio (modern-day Orange) in 105 BC.

The military strategist waited for the right occasion to carry out a surprise attack. He had garnered the respect of infantrymen through his leadership. To test the waters, he took his meal with them.

“While Cezanne brooded over his endless rejections at the Official Salon in Paris, Marius chomped at the bit,” speculated the pedestrian, caught between two destinies.

Scouts stealthily followed the rowdy tribes. Besides a skirmish barely slowing their advance, the invaders reached the Waters of Sextius (modern-day Aix-en-Provence) without trouble. It was the last chance to stop them before the Alps, which formed a natural barrier in northern Italy.

Marius worked out to strike where King Teutebod did not expect him. The Roman cavalry viciously attacked the enemy’s rear, causing confusion and despair in its ranks. The crowding of the encircled Barbarian army caused a slaughter. Romains claimed to have killed 90,000 and captured 20,000 Barbarians. As for legionnaires, they suffered minor losses in their ranks, with 1,000-something casualties.

Rome, the eternal city, was avenged in a blood bath. The pestilence spread miles around because cadavers were not buried in mass graves. A hamlet near the battlefield was named Pourrieres. Its name was derived from the French verb pourrir (to rot).

Three hundred virgins had to be handed over to the victor. The virginity pledge was a paramount concern to the not-so-much-barbarian people. To protect their chastity, a delegation of matrons begged Marius to send them to the temple of Venus, the goddess of love and fertility in Rome. The cold-blooded General brushed aside their plea.

The virgins, who had been rounded up like cattle, pondered the shameful verdict. Ultimately, death was preferred to dishonor. They chose to commit mass suicide when the surveillance was low during the night. They cut their wrist veins with a stolen dagger.

By a twist of fate, a road steeped in bloody history was named after a pacifist artist. Paul Cezanne was a deserter searched by the police during the Franco-Prussian War. First, he hid in the Jas de Bouffan, the family estate.

Maxime Conil was Cezanne’s brother-in-law. The lawyer married Rose, the artist’s youngest sister. According to Conil, the gendarmes came to the Jas de Bouffan with an arrest warrant. Paul told his mother to open all the doors and let them search the property because he knew every nook and cranny. Thus, the smart aleck eluded capture.

At nightfall, the artist packed a few belongings and set off for l’Estaque, about fifteen miles from Aix. He stayed there in a house owned by his parents for the duration of the war.

The gendarmes got wind of his clandestinity there from a snitch. They came at dawn to arrest him. Madame Cezanne, who maintained constant vigilance, warned her son. He escaped through a back door into the bush with a basket of provisions.

The biographer Joachim Gasquet did not hide the artist’s discreditable conduct during the war. 

I want to conceal nothing, omit nothing from what I know of his life. The gendarmes searched for him near Aix. He fled with his mother to l’Estaque. He worked by the sea.

Meanwhile, the minibus reached Le Tholonet. The standoffish woman alighted in icy silence. The pedestrian turned his head and observed her with keen interest.

“With her pale complexion, jaws sparsely dotted with freckles, and calm demeanor, she proves a worthy successor to those fiery virgin women,” fancied the pedestrian. He was too romantic to know anything about her except what he wished her to be. His mind was full of her. She stabbed him with a fierce glance when she reached the front seat. Although his flirtatious instincts had been crushed before, it had never been done so mercilessly.

Le Tholonet underwent an invasion, but this one was bloodless. The hamlet had mutated into suburbia, which encroached upon nature everywhere. Separate houses mushroomed between wrecked vineyards in the vale and sections in forested hills. Since artist André Masson settled there after the Second World War, the population had increased five-fold!

Nicknamed the “Versailles of Aix,” the castle was miraculously preserved from the suburban craze, which fueled a frenzy of activity and speculation. The garden surrounding it rekindled a painful memory in the pedestrian’s heart.

On a summer day, affluent boys steered model sailboats with bamboo sticks along the canal bisecting the park. Each vessel displayed a flag. The clothing etiquette was to wear a marine shirt, short white pants, leather sandals, and a boater straw hat. The rich were in a familiar environment, not the witness from the boonies. Instead of appreciating the show offered by the gentry, the young spectator was consumed in jealousy. He played in a shriveled pinewood that unconcerned drivers had transformed into an illegal dump.

The Gallifet family owned the castle in the nineteenth century. After a second cholera outbreak, the town council of Aix-en-Provence took the bull by the horns. It voted on a grandiose project to construct two dams upstream to secure fresh water for the population.

Francesco Zolla, a Venetian engineer, won the tender. Though he lived in Paris, he did not hesitate a second when he got wind of the project in Provence. The cosmopolitan engineer had good credentials. He had supervised the construction of a railway in Linz, Austria. When he eventually settled in Paris, he married Emilie Aubert. The bride was twenty-three years younger than the groom. She bore a son, Emile, destined for a great career in literature. In order to land a job in France, the engineer gallicized his name. Francesco became François, and Zolla was converted into Zola.

To implement his project, the engineer had to divert the water that supplied Le Tholonet Park. It was the crux of the matter because nobody could bully the Marquess of Gallifet into accepting that Leonine clause. The nobleman shrewdly vetoed the businessman with the backing of washerwomen. Since those launderers worked for affluent people, the conflict of interests divided the entire population.

The litigation lasted seven years until a Judgment of Solomon cut the coveted water flow in half. It was a Pyrrhic victory for Zola because the long trial drained his capital considerably.

The worried businessman carefully monitored rock explosions to construct the first dam. The selected site was in a gorge under the Bibemus plateau, where Cezanne would gather his inspiration.

A week after black powder detonations echoed in the canyon, Zola left the construction site and took the train to Marseille. He had a meeting with a banker consortium about an umpteenth credit request. Enfeebled by sleepless nights, the entrepreneur got sick on that short business trip. A week later, he died of pneumonia. He was 51.

Zola was an avant-garde architect. The dam under construction was the first masonry using the arch technique curved upstream. When completed, it was named after Zola in recognition of his talent. Sad to relate, the dam’s usefulness declined as the flow was inherently weak to supply a growing population.

Two decades after Zola’s death, Gallifet acquired the worst reputation in France. He turned out to be an adamant General during the Franco-Prussian War. His abominable track record was established when he led a cavalry brigade during the savage repression of the Paris Commune.

One day, the General gestured with a lacquered walking cane to the prisoners: “Let those with grayish hair come out of the ranks!” One hundred or so detainees moved forward. “You,” he declared, “because you saw June 1848, you are guiltier than the others!” That year was marked by an uprising in response to the closure of National Workshops.

Gallifet ordered the execution of those veterans in the Passy fortress’s ditches. To add insult to injury, he chose Easter Day for the public execution. The mercurial officer granted himself the right to life or death on any Communard. At his discretion, he took blood tithes from convoys of prisoners. Journalists nicknamed him indifferently the marquis with red heels or the Paris Commune’s butcher.

Gallifet made headlines again when he became the Minister of Defense in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. The entrenched government of Prime Minister Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau needed him to save the republic. Politicians hated him for his brutality, but he had a quality they were deprived of. He had the guts to implement an unpopular decision. Only Gallifet could stuff down the officers’ throats with the revision of the Dreyfus trial.

Gallifet never lost his confidence, whatever the circumstances. When he delivered his introductory speech at the parliament, left-wing deputies shouted: “Killer! Assassin!” Anyone in his shoes would have blotted out the memory of the execution of three thousand Communards, but not him. He retorted to his detractors: “Killer? Present!” His provocative acknowledgment was unprecedented.

Emile Zola, the son of the Italian engineer, wrote an open letter, J’accuse, in response to the Dreyfus affair. He accused President Felix Faure and his government of antisemitism.

When the court acquitted Dreyfus, Gallifet humorously said, “The incident is closed!” An affair that threatened the republic was reduced to a quibble.

The cowardly government sacked Gallifet as soon as the unpopular reviewing of the trial ended with the rehabilitation of Captain Dreyfus. Georges Clemenceau wrote in his diary: “Gallifet has not shot any prisoners in over twenty years. Life is monotonous. What joy do we have in store after his departure?”

Gallifet applied a double-standard relationship with the Zolas. He was uncompromising with the father, whose premature death ruined the family when creditors took over his venture firm. In contrast to the dogged litigation, the marquis hewed closely to the son in the Dreyfus affair. Strangely, the nobleman rallied to a cause detrimental to his monarchist upbringing. The dark side of human nature is inscrutable.

The author in Budapest in February 1983 during the Cold War