The schoolboy Paul Cézanne was a sensitive brute. At thirteen, he was almost full-grown.

He
entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix as a half-boarder in the sixth grade in 1852. Half-boarders
slept at home—in Cézanne’s case, a bourgeois house in the center of the town, a fifteen-minute
walk away—but spent most of their waking hours at school, from seven in the morning (six in
summer) until seven in the evening. Like many Aixois families, the Cézannes took advantage of
the opportunity to combine public education and domestic education, as the school prospectus
tactfully put it, for a modest three hundred francs per year, dinner and snack included. This
arrangement continued for his first four years. For the last two he became a day boy. Whether he
was by then sufficiently domesticated must be open to doubt.

Intelligent, spirited, somewhat introverted, he was clever enough and sturdy enough to get by
with the other boys. He boasted of translating one hundred Latin verses in no time at all, for the
price of two sous. “I was a businessman, by Jove!” It was as commercial as he ever got. His
ambitions were inarticulate. Among friends, he was eager for adventure: boys’ own pursuits, of a
wholesome kind, spiced with poetry. Girls were out of bounds. They could be adored but not
accosted. Making love meant serenading the object of one’s affections from afar—the
ungovernable in search of the unattainable. For Cézanne, romantic fervor and libidinous impulse
vied with conventional inhibition. He was unsure of himself, but Aix was his stamping ground.
Here, he knew the form. He had the patter, or the patois. He spoke the language.

In the year below was little Émile Zola, a boarder. Émile did not mix well. “My years in school
were years of tears,” says the hero of his fiercely autobiographical first novel, La Confession de
Claude (1865). “I had in me the pride of loving natures. I was unloved because I was unknown
and I refused to make myself known.” Émile did not speak the language. He spoke with a lisp
and a Parisian accent; his name sounded foreign; he was fatherless (Zola père died of pleurisy
when Émile was six); his mother and grandmother came to visit him every day, in a parlor
reserved for the purpose. In the bear pit of the boarders, Zola was a mama’s boy. He could not
pass for Provençal. He did not care. The insult was cordially returned: they called him le
Franciot (Frenchy). Among the bourgeois Aixois, Zola was different. They were fat, he was thin.
Worse, he was poor. His early writing fairly pulsates with contempt for the good-for-nothing
bourgeois. The last lines of the novels are often revealing. The last line of Le Ventre de Paris
(1873) is the Cézanne character’s parting shot—one of the real Cézanne’s favorite expressions—
a muttered imprecation against the plump of the world: “What bastards respectable people are!”

Zola craved renown and respectability. At the Collège Bourbon, he was deprived of both. He was
a boursier, a scholarship boy, living on charity. “Beggar!” the other boys taunted him. “Parasite!”
Sometimes they beat him up. Sometimes they refused to speak to him altogether. “For the
smallest thing, he was put in quarantine,” Cézanne remembered. “And really our friendship
stemmed from that . . . from a thrashing I got from everyone in the playground, big and small,
because I took no notice, I defied the ban, I couldn’t help talking to him anyway . . . A decent
sort. The next day, he brought me a big basket of apples.”

Recounting this to the young Joachim Gasquet, the son of Cézanne’s friend Henri Gasquet, some
forty years later, he added with a sly wink, “Cézanne’s apples, see, they go back a long way.”
Apples were not only Cézanne’s capital subject, the subject he succeeded in knowing fully, “all
round,” as D. H. Lawrence aptly said; they were freighted with meaning and complex emotion.
In Zola’s novel Madeleine Ferat (1868), this story of origins (minus the apples) becomes the tale
of Jacques and Guillaume at a local collège in Véteuil. The family backgrounds are transposed,
and the character sketches jumbled, but the thrust is clear. Guillaume is christened “Bastard” and
persecuted by the other boys. He is tearful and wretched, but soon enough he finds his savior.

Guillaume, however, had one friend at school. As he was about to start his second year, a new
pupil entered the same class. He was a big, strong, sturdy boy, who was two or three years older.
His name was Jacques Berthier. An orphan, having only an uncle, a lawyer in Véteuil, he had
come to the school in that town to complete the humanities course he had begun in Paris . . . On
the very day he arrived, he noticed a big rascally boy bullying Guillaume. He raced over and
made the boy understand that he would have to reckon with him if he tormented the others like
that. Then he took the arm of the persecuted one and walked with him throughout the break, to
the outrage of the other boys who -couldn’t understand how the Parisian could choose a friend
like him . . . Guillaume . . . developed an ardent friendship for his protector. He loved him as one
loves a first mistress, with absolute loyalty and blind devotion . . . Jacques accepted in good part
the adoration of his protégé. He loved to show off his strength and be praised. Besides he was
overwhelmed by the fond caresses of this character, puny and proud, who crushed the others
with his scorn. During the two years they spent at the school, they were inseparable.

“The Inseparables” became their call sign and caste mark. Like the Musketeers, they were three.
Cézanne and Zola were joined by Baptistin Baille, later a distinguished scientist, professor of
optics and acoustics at the School of Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris, an institution he
helped to found. Young Baille was a bright spark, and good company. He played host to their
schoolboy escapades. The Bailles lived in a large house on the Cours Sextius, near the baths. A
big room on the third floor served as the Inseparables’ den, laboratory, and workshop. Here they
ate the grapes that hung from the ceiling; they risked their lives (so they liked to think) brewing
up strange concoctions in chemical retorts; they composed three-act plays. At school, if Zola’s
fictionalized reminiscence is to be trusted, they were not always little angels. They stole the
shoes of Mimi-la-Mort, otherwise known as the Skeleton Day Boy, a spindly youth who used to
keep the others supplied with snuff, and burned them in the stove. They stole matches from the
chapel to smoke dried chestnut leaves in their homemade pipes. They marched round the pond in
a cortège, singing dirges, with sawed-off benches from the playground, pretending they were
corpses come to life, and Baille fell in as he tried to fill his cap with water. The young scamp
Cézanne seems to have reveled in all this. One day he had the bright idea of roasting some
Maybugs in the bottom of his desk, to see if they were good to eat, as people said. The smoke
escaping from the desk was so thick and acrid that the supervisor grabbed a jug of water,
thinking there was a fire.

These japes must have been welcome distraction. Life at the Collège Bourbon was not an
unalloyed pleasure. There was no heating. In winter, the interminable recitations began in clouds
of steam. The ground-floor études, or study rooms, were depressing places: airless, humid, dimly
lit, with the damp running down the walls. The pond where the boys learned to swim was
covered in slime. School uniform was a trial: blue woolen tunic with red border and gold palms
on the collar; matching blue trousers; blue kepi. School meals were so bad that there were
occasional riots. Zola, who liked his food, remembered horrible dishes, “among others, a strange
codfish stew that poisoned the mold . . . We made up for it with bread, we stuffed crusts in our
pocket and ate them in class or in the playground. For the six years I was there, I was hungry.”

Excerpted from Cezanne by Alex Danchev. Copyright © 2012 by Alex Danchev. Excerpted by
permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.