He was not dead but unconscious.
The two men eventually managed to hoist him up on to their cart and take him to
his residence in town, where they left him in the care of his landlady,
Mme Bremond. The first thing he is said to have asked on regaining
consciousness was whether the sun was shining again. He wanted to go back
out of doors to finish the painting he was working on when it had started
to rain. However, the artist was never able to finish it.
Paul Cezanne, in
his youth a friend of Emile Zola's, died seven days later. All his life he
had been regarded as sickly: "Without painting he would have been nothing
but a shy, introspective psychopath incapable of living a normal life —
this is the image his family and the people of Aix seem to have had of
him", thus one of
Cezanne's many biographers. Some of the painter's
eccentricities have been recorded and range from nervous irritability and
a phobia of physical contact, to paranoia.
Cezanne went through phases of
deep depression followed by manic periods during which he grandly
over-estimated himself and his abilities. Then he would write about his
celebrated former colleagues in Paris, such as
Manet or
Renoir: "Compared
to me, all my compatriots are idiots". Painting was the only thing that kept the unpredictable Provencal, whose world
was as unsteady as a damaged ship floundering in heavy seas, on a fairly
even keel.
Cezanne preferred to paint out of doors. However, because he could not
bear having anyone look over his shoulder while he was painting, he fled
town and sought the solitude of nature in the surrounding countryside.
Cezanne was obsessed with Mont Sainte-Victoire. He drew and painted more
than sixty versions of this massive limestone escarpment, which looms a
thousand metres above the flat country fifteen kilometres east of Aix. Here, he was alone and could
forget all his troubles with the municipal authorities, who, he felt, had
ruined the city with pavements, hideous promenades and gas lights. A
further advantage of the mountains was that they were serenely static.
Always squabbling with someone about something when he was not painting,
Cezanne concentrated so hard on his still lifes that the fruit was
invariably rotten before he had finished. It once took him 115 sittings to
complete a portrait and he was known to have burst into a terrible rage at
sitters who altered their expression. It was ideal for him that the face
of Mont Sainte-Victoire only changed with the varying light and the
seasons of the year. The "Sacred Mountain of Provence", as Mont Sainte-Victoire
is sometimes called, became the leitmotif of
Cezanne's work. Under its
shadow began and ended the life of a painter who hardly exchanged a word
with others, yet stirred the world with his groundbreaking pictorial
language.
