The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne by M. L. Longworth

regards. I’m Paul. I’ve painted a few times with your brother.”
    Manon smiled. “You’re also a friend of M. Zola’s,” she said, carefully placing his brioche in a box.
    The client nodded then put his hand up. “Save the fancy box for someone else,” he said. “Just put my cake in some paper.”
    â€œ
Oui
, Monsieur—”
    â€œCézanne.”

Chapter Four

A Short Story, a Photograph,
    and a Painting
    A ntoine Verlaque set his pen down and looked at what he had just written. Months ago he had begun writing short stories, a few paragraphs at a time. No one knew. He wrote in English; it wasn’t his mother tongue, but he was bilingual and had been inspired after reading an essay about Samuel Beckett, who wrote his plays not in his native tongue but in French. The reason surprised, and delighted, the judge: Beckett claimed that writing in French gave his prose a roughness, an imperfection, which he liked. It suited his plays.
    It was late and Verlaque knew he should be in bed. He looked at the framed photo on his desk: a black and white of Marine and him. Marine’s best friend, Sylvie, had taken it while the three of them vacationed together on the Île Sordou. When Sylvie had thrust her small Leica into their faces, Verlaque had assumed she was using color film; it was summer and they wereon a Mediterranean island—blues and greens abounded. But it had stormed the night before and the sky was—rare for summer—cloudy, and the sea choppy, and so Sylvie, who made a comfortable living as an art photographer, had wisely chosen black and white. The tops of their heads were cut off, which only made the portrait more intense; the viewer’s gaze, instead of focused on their hair, or the background, was instead forced to examine Marine’s and Verlaque’s faces. They were both smiling, and laughing. As a child Antoine Verlaque had rarely smiled in photos, much to the chagrin of his beloved grandmother Emmeline. He now knew why he hadn’t smiled in those photographs: to show his parents that he was not happy. M. and Mme Verlaque had failed to give their two sons the love and affection they so desperately needed. Whether they had noticed their son’s expressionless face in family photos he didn’t know. But Emmeline and Charles, his paternal grandparents, certainly had.
    He stared at Marine’s face in the photo and tried to read it. Was she unhappy? She was laughing, but then Marine always laughed around Sylvie. When they began dating, Sylvie’s presence had been a thorn in Verlaque’s side; he was jealous of the deep relationship and easiness the two women shared. It took him a year or more to realize that Marine needed Sylvie’s craziness to balance her own calm, at times overly considerate, selflessness. Verlaque grew to appreciate—even love—Sylvie when he realized that they were alike: both bossy, and opinionated, and in some weird way both vying for Marine’s love and attention. That week on Sordou taught him that Sylvie was not a threat; Marine was in fact stronger than the two of them, and it took both Sylvie Grassi and Antoine Verlaque to balance Marine Bonnet’s steadfast and honest character.
    He got up and closed the cover of his notebook and turned off the desk lamp. Tomorrow would be a new day, and he’d do anything to make things right again with Marine. She’d love, too, the story of old René and his supposed Cézanne painting. Verlaque walked into the bathroom to change and remembered that Marine’s father, Dr. Anatole Bonnet, was somewhat of a Cézanne aficionado. Perhaps he would invite Marine and her parents over for dinner.
    He began to unbutton his shirt as he stared at Pierre Soulages’s large black textured painting; each time he did this he saw something new in it. Tonight, the artist’s thick brushstrokes, reaching across the immense canvas vertically