Cézanne's Literary Incarnations
Il faut se méfier des littérateurs. Quand ils vous fichent le grappin dessus, toute la peinture y passe.1
Analysis of the extent of Cézanne's contribution to Zola's character Claude Lantier in L'Œuvre has caused much debate2 and indeed resentment3, while the artist's other appearances in the literature of his time have received relatively little attention.4 While it is not within the scope of this study to trace the iconographical sources of any paintings attributed to these fictional characters, a brief survey of Cézanne's 'other selves', as well as being of intrinsic interest, does much to inform us of the justness of certain aspects of Zola's portrait of his childhood friend, whose looks, personality and approach to art provided inspiration for distinctive traits of the protagonists or other composite characters in the works of Edmond Duranty, Paul Alexis, Gustave Geffroy, Octave Mirbeau, Joachim Gasquet and Marius Roux.
It is worthwhile recalling for the purposes of comparison that, while Zola attributes both the physical appearance of the young Cézanne and some of his early canvases to Lantier, the character is predestined by the internal logic of the Rougon-Macquart novels to be a failure. He ultimately takes his own life because of Zola's constant imperatives of heredity and milieu: the ineluctable flaw in his mother's line is both physical (a lesion in the eye and brain)5 and mental (suicidal despair at being unable to realize his vision on [End Page 36] canvas), while his milieu (the poor quarters of Paris and the nineteenth-century art world to which he aspires) affords him no chance of success given his lack of means and the 'closed shop' system operated by the École des Beaux-Arts and its acolytes against outsiders who do not follow its dictates.
Some of the traits which Zola took from Cézanne to build his fictional character, while admittedly negative, are well attested by others who knew him. His impatient, volatile nature and irascibility are highlighted in the sequence where Claude wants to stick his fist through the portrait of Sandoz, Zola's alter ego in the novel, because he is dissatisfied with his progress-and indeed he carries this intent through with a subsequent painting.6 This incident is based on personal experience, for Zola told their old schoolfriend Jean-Baptistin Baille that Cézanne attacked his portrait with the same disconcerting violence. He added ruefully, 'Paul peut avoir le génie d'un grand peintre, il n'aura jamais le génie de le devenir'.7 His intransigence in argument is also transmitted to Claude, who lost his temper if friends questioned his approach to his work.8 Cézanne left the Café Guerbois in a rage if painter and writer friends disagreed with him.9 According to Zola, 'prouver quelque chose à Cézanne, ce serait vouloir persuader aux tours de Notre Dame d'exécuter un quadrille'.10
Claude's obsessive devotion to painting, mania for perfection and crippling lack of faith in his own creations are also an echo of Cézanne, who lived only in terms of his quest for some unattainable absolute in art and neglected all other aspects of existence. He told Zola: 'le travail . . . est, je le pense, malgré toutes les alternatives, le seul refuge où l'on trouve le contentement réel de soi'.11 When already forty he admitted to him: 'Je m'ingénie toujours à trouver ma voie picturale. La nature m'offre les plus grandes difficultés'.12 His ineradicable insecurity about his own achievements is widely attested by contemporaries and confirmed by his personal identification with his favourite fictional character, Frenhofer, Balzac's painter in Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu who died in despair when he failed to express his ideal.13 Marius Roux said: 'Sa modestie se refuse à lui laisser croire que ce qu...
