“uttering joyous leaves of dark green.”  They utter, if anything, raucous oaths, as seemingly do the self-portraits—­exceedingly well modelled, however.  Cezanne’s still-life attracts by its whole-souled absorption; these fruits and vegetables really savour of the earth.  Chardin interprets still-life with realistic beauty; if he had ever painted an onion it would have revealed a certain grace.  When Paul Cezanne paints an onion you smell it.  Nevertheless, he has captured the affections of the rebels and is their god.  And next season it may be some one else.

It may interest readers of Zola’s L’Oeuvre to learn about one of the characters, who perforce sat for his portrait in that clever novel (a direct imitation of Goncourt’s Manette Salomon).  Paul Cezanne bitterly resented the liberty taken by his old school friend Zola.  They both hailed from Aix, in Provence.  Zola went up to Paris; Cezanne remained in his birthplace but finally persuaded his father to let him study art at the capital.  His father was both rich and wise, for he settled a small allowance on Paul, who, poor chap, as he said, would never earn a franc from his paintings.  This prediction was nearly verified.  Cezanne was almost laughed off the artistic map of Paris.  Manet they could stand, even Claude Monet; but Cezanne—­communard and anarchist he must be (so said the wise ones in official circles), for he was such a villainous painter!  Cezanne died, but not before his apotheosis by the new crowd of the Autumn Salon.  We are told by admirers of Zola how much he did for his neglected and struggling fellow-townsman; how the novelist opened his arms to Cezanne.  Cezanne says quite the contrary.  In the first place he had more money than Zola when they started, and Zola, after he had become a celebrity, was a great man and very haughty.

“A mediocre intelligence and a detestable friend” is the way the prototype of Claude Lantier puts the case.  “A bad book and a completely false one,” he added, when speaking to the painter Emile Bernard on the disagreeable theme.  Naturally Zola did not pose his old friend for the entire figure of the crazy impressionist, his hero, Claude.  It was a study composed of Cezanne, Bazille, and one other, a poor, wretched lad who had been employed to clean Manet’s studio, entertained artistic ambitions, but hanged himself.  The conversations Cezanne had with Zola, his extreme theories of light, are all in the novel—­by the way, one of Zola’s most finished efforts.  Cezanne, an honest, hard-working man, bourgeois in habits if not by temperament, was grievously wounded by the treachery of Zola; and he did not fail to denounce this treachery to Bernard.