CÉZanne and His Temperament
Dore Ashton
One of the most stirring accounts of Cézanne's old age was offered by the painter Émile Bernard in his memoirs. Bernard spent time with Cézanne in Aix when the artist was already considered a hopeless eccentric, stoned by boys in the streets. One evening at dinner, Bernard mentioned Frenhofer, the hero of Balzac's story, "The Unknown Masterpiece." Cézanne "got up from the table, planted himself before me, and, striking his chest with his index finger, he designated himself—without a word—but through this repeated gesture, as the very person in the story. He was so moved that tears filled his eyes."
Cézanne's identification with Frenhofer, the ecstatic painter in Balzac's fable whose masterpiece receded during ten years' struggle and was finally rendered unintelligible to his contemporaries, is more than an anecdote. Nearly 40 years before, Cézanne had amused himself by answering questions in a little eight-page album, "Mes Confidences." The album, decorated with the furbelows dear to the 19th-century middle classes, posed 24 questions of preferences ranging from favorite smells, flowers, and food, to favorite painters and writers. To the question: to what character from literature or the theater are you most drawn, he had replied Frenhofer.
Who was Frenhofer for Cézanne? Balzac draws him as a genius ferociously obsessed with a vision; a painter physically resembling the aged Rembrandt whose quest for perfection, as he worked for ten years on his portrait of a famous courtesan, led him to the abyss of abstraction. When two younger painters—the middle-aged Porbus and the very young Poussin—visit Frenhofer's studio and finally persuade him to show
