Looking for Cezanne

 

I went away, I did some things, and I'm back, hopefully with a few posts I can get together. There is much happening in my life right now, and this has nothing to do with any of it. The whisky is McLelland's Speyside, cheap but sufficient.

 

LOOKING FOR CEZANNE

I can’t walk a straight course in Paris. I knew where to find Cezanne, or, at least, the Cezanne I was looking for, starting at the Metro St Germain des Pres. 

Straight up, straight out, but there was the platform to get past, on which was mounted a display of the famous writers artists and thinkers who had lived, worked and socialised in the Boulevard St Germain. It was impossible to pass by the facsimile copies of Rimbaud, Hemingway, Levi-Strauss, Kerouak, Verlain, Chateaubriand and others without at least giving a nod to them, a salute or a quick, stiff bow. Their letters and journals live a little, even after their deaths, as legacies do.

But I was looking for Cezanne.

Les Deux Magots didn’t help. Leaving the platform, up the stairs, after homage to those who had planted their arses in the coffee shop and debated the world since 1884. Perhaps, if I planted mine in the same chair as Picasso or Sartre, some DNA, some atom, some essence of a great mind, or at least the arse of a great mind, would transfer to me. 

If a journey is disjointed, it is all to the greater good; if you are lost, you can never tell what you will find. The coffee was foul, as French coffee is, but the pastis was good, and I wondered if Cezanne had ever sat here and drunk Ricard, on a visit from Provence to his wife and son in Paris. Not old, but troubled by ill-health, relationships, contemplating a return to Catholicism, savouring cloudy anise while nurturing nascent cubism. Perhaps the tiniest part of Cezanne was here.

Leaving Les Deux Magots didn’t help. Stalls lined the boulevard, gaudy with fabrics and shiny with jewels. Worse, when I escaped the bright displays, I was not on my course down the Rue des Saint-Peres, but strolling the Rue de Buci, on the way to Rue de Seine. Strolling in Paris, looking at shops, at people, chatting; I had, unknowingly, become a flaneur.

The Rue de Seine is unfair to the directed person, one who has Cezanne’s address. Galleries line the street, open to those who would inspect their treasures. Photographs, antiquities, sculptures, paintings and some dross for tourists. But Gallerie Arcturus and the other fourteen galleries in the street can weary even the most dedicated browser, and the tiny, weathered façade of Au Brin Du Zinc invited me in for a coffee and a croque monsieur. The wood was burnished, the bar dented and stained by time and trade, as were the old man and woman who served me. They were real, but the image of card players at another table was illusory, or a very persistent ghost.

The Quai Malaquais comes back a space as it passes Rue Bonaparte and becomes Quai Voltaire on the way to Pont du Carousel. Musicians, beggars, vendors and pickpockets crowd the green grass between the Quai and the Seine, but none were on the side where I walked, so distracted by the carnival across the road that I walked straight past 3, Quai Voltaire. But I turned back, and saw where my Cezanne lived.

My Cezanne is the colour he explored so brilliantly, and it was here, at 3, Quai Voltaire, that he bought at least some of those colours. Magasin Sennelier, supplying colours to artists since 1887. To walk inside is to walk into a spectrum kaleidoscope, a fractured rainbow, a field of flowers sown by a madman. It is to walk into a joyous canvas, colours so rich and fine that I’m scared to touch them.

Reds that bleed into and onto the field, greens as deep as a courtesan’s velvet gown, blues from inkiness to a tinge in milk, yellows that Van Gogh used for the sun. All held up for display, all available. Sennelier still supplies eighty pure pigments, and more than five hundred colours. What could Leonardo have done with them? Cezanne did so much with them.

I buy a small set of pastels, bright, deep colours; my very own piece of Cezanne. I’m still too scared to use them.