A PILGRIMAGE TO AIX-EN-PROVENCE
One month ago I left my house obscenely early one morning in the pitch black and plodded down to Hastings station to catch the first train of the day to Gatwick airport.
I didn’t see anyone or a single car moving and I didn’t really believe that the 5.08 train would run. There were however a few worn and desultory souls on the platform and the train arrived. I flew to Marseillles and was in Aix-En-Provence by lunchtime.
The following morning I walked a couple of kilometres out of the town, to the north, up to Les Lauves where Cezanne had a studio built in 1901. I approached like Abraham going up the mountain to meet his god… or as one might approach Bob Dylan.
And the buggers wouldn’t let me in. Me ! His number bloody one disciple. The studio was full with a pre booked group of Americans.
So, I had two and a half hours to kill until the studio reopened after lunch.
I continued on up the hill to find LE TERRAIN DES PEINTRES, the place which afforded Cezanne a perfect view of the Mont St Victoire and the spot where he had worked for much of the last five years of his life and where he made eleven of the most beautiful and accomplished oil paintings ever painted.
Uncharacteristically the French hadn’t overdone it, there are just eleven plaques with images of Cezanne’s paintings and nothing else.
… there was a young German man there. We talked and I told him how the soil around the base of the mountain is red because a century before christ 100 000 invading Germans had been slaughtered there by Caesar’s general Marius. He claimed that they would have been technically Teutons rather than Germans but then he left almost immediately…
and then it was just me and the mountain.
As I stood, exactly where my master had stood (see photo), and looked at his mountain a 5 Euro note was blown tumbling along the ground right to my feet. It was certainly from Cezanne. He was saying ‘Russell, go and find yourself a bar and raise a glass to my memory’, so I did.
