Une lecture de Paul Alexis chez Zola (A reading of Paul Alexis at Zola)

Two men from Aix-en-Provence in a Paris room. The one reading aloud is Paul Alexis, a young writer who had followed Emile Zola north from their home town. The listener slumped on the floor is Zola, still years away from being famous. Cézanne laid it out as a major picture, a metre and a half across, and then stopped work on it. The usual explanation is the war. France declared war on Prussia in July 1870, the empire collapsed within weeks, and Cézanne left Paris for the coast near Marseille rather than report for conscription. He never took the canvas up again. Zola's body is blocked in and left there, and the sheet of paper in Alexis's hand is barely more than a scrape of paint, as though the manuscript were still being written. Zola kept the picture anyway, and it hung in his house at Médan outside Paris until he died.