Introduction

A beautiful young woman is found murdered . . . and the clues to her death point to her spurned lover, Paul Cézanne.

In this richly atmospheric novel, a mysterious young woman named Solange Vernet arrives in Aix-en-Provence with her lover, a Darwinian scholar named Charles Westbury, and a year later is found strangled in a quarry outside the city. The young and inexperienced magistrate, Bernard Martin, finds his investigation caught in the crossfires of a raging cultural debate.

Initially assuming that Solange’s murder was a simple crime de passion by either a jealous Cézanne or a betrayed Westbury, Bernard soon finds himself on a mission to unravel the secrets of Solange and Cezanne’s hidden past. Exploring questions of science and religion that persist even to this day, Cezanne’s Quarry is a provocative debut mystery about life, death, love, and art.

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Excerpt

From the first chapter of Cézanne’s Quarry. The young examining magistrate Bernard Martin and his inspector, Albert Franc, search for the body of a woman in the quarry.

They made a slow, mostly silent ascent along the stony white road, past farmhouses with red tile roofs, yellowing vineyards, and groves of crooked, silver-leafed olive trees. In the distance, the luminous limestone hills jutted up toward a cloudless blue sky. Everything struck Martin as too bright, almost unnaturally so. It was nothing like the north where he had grown up. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. As an examining magistrate (juge d'instruction), Bernard Martin holds a position of great authority in the French legal system, and yet he himself does not yet feel or embrace his power. Why?

2. What did you learn about Cézanne the artist from reading Cézanne's Quarry?

3. And Cézanne the man? Malcolm Gladwell (the author of Blink) compared prodigies and experimenters in art in a 2008 New Yorker article. Picasso was his model prodigyfamous young and ever changing; Cézanne, his late blooming experimenter, who, after all, painted Mont Sainte-Victoire over 80 times!

What effect did "late blooming" have on Cézanne's approach to artand on his friendship with Zola?

4. Cézanne's Quarry depicts many conventional (Marthe, the Choffruts) and unconventional (Solange, Hortense, Clarie, Sibylline) women. What were the dangers of going against the tide? Were there any benefits?

5. Westerbury claims that he wanted to reconcile science and religion. How do the controversies in Cézanne's Quarry compare or contrast with similar controversies today?

6. To quote Solange Vernet, "Only two men could fight over a mountain." What role did the Provençal landscape play in Cézanne's Quarry? In the struggle between Westerbury and Cezanne? In Martin's imagination?

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