Paul Cézanne: Following in the post-Impressionist's footsteps

As we climb the final metres of art's most celebrated mountain, an infant mistral nibbles at the heat. A rock clatters down the precipice. From the colossal summit cross, the panorama is stupendous, but the Montagne Ste-Victoire, so familiar from Cézanne's many paintings of it, appears a different mountain here: the giddying perspective down its scimitar ridge is among the few that escaped the driven artist's brush.

But was it here that it all began? It seems inconceivable that the young Paul Cézanne, who loved to roam the Aixois countryside with his school friend Emile Zola, never adventured up the 1,000m-high limestone monolith that hovered over his city like a sky-scraping white pyramid, pinkly luminescent at sunset and dawn.

Vertiginously far below is the twinkling blue eye of the dam that Zola's father built, and a Provençal patchwork of olive groves and vineyards banking the river Arc where the boys swam. Aix-en-Provence, the city Cézanne made forever inseparable from his memory and his mountain, distantly shimmers like a mirage in the haze.

Cézanne's father owned a hat shop, and its time-bleached sign is eerily still visible among the elegant façades of the Cours Mirabeau, arguably Europe's loveliest street. Paul was born nearby, at 29 rue de l'Opéra, on 19 January 1839, which we are dismayed to discover is a graffiti-covered shell. No blue plaques here: beside the lintel's peeling paint, a barely legible inscription confirms that this is the place.

Cold-shouldered in his lifetime, Cézanne today doubles as Aix's international trademark and most famous son, whose name adorns restaurants, hospitals and schools.

Explore the tangled lanes where Cézanne lived and died, and there seems scarcely an alley, often scarcely a house, without associations with his 67 years of life. A tourist-office map entitled "In the Steps of Cézanne" charts his peregrinations from cradle to grave. Some steps boast brass pavement studs but, trying to track him chronologically, we are soon magically lost in village-like backwaters with Cézanne links so thick on the ground that, five minutes from his birthplace, we unexpectedly discover the house where he died. It is now a doctor's surgery. In labyrinthine old Aix, everywhere seems near everywhere else.

Paul was christened at the Eglise de la Madeleine, whose 11th-century columns overlook the pulsating Place des Prêcheurs. Featuring possibly the planet's most colourful market, its kaleidoscope of flowers, vegetables, fruit, cheeses and hams - Bouzigues oysters €2 a dozen - seductively diffuses the flavours of Provence. Cézanneland is a chessboard of markets: one day or another, every square holds one; on Saturdays, all trade exuberantly at once.

Cosmopolitan, with confidence, style and around 300 sunny days a year, Aix cheers you up as few places can. Small wonder that the artist - always struggling with depression - never thrived elsewhere. In high spirits ourselves, peaches and figs fuel our continuing pilgrimage.

When Paul was nine, his father opened Aix's first bank, becoming, by Paul's teens, the richest citizen and buying Aix's grandest mansion: the 17th-century Jas de Bouffan, previously the abode of Provence's Governor and where Cézanne mainly lived and painted during 40 years of failure.

The soaring Saint-Sauveur cathedral was Cézanne's lifelong place of worship, and, indeed, the setting for his funeral. Here, Aixois have worshipped for 1,600 years. Its stunning façade hides Europe's loveliest Romanesque cloisters, but in the stillness of the fifth-century baptistery, ringed by earlier columns from a Temple of Apollo, the city's antiquity seeps from the very stones.

Facing the cathedral is the handsome university: a 1409 glory of Good King René's reign, whose name competes with that of Cézanne for ubiquity in Aix. Père Cézanne's insistence that his son study law is recorded on a flagstone constantly trodden on by the 20,000 students who keep the city alive when the tourists depart.

Few own-country prophets have been honoured less than Cézanne. Even after the artist's posthumous recognition, the director of Aix museum, one M. Pontier, swore that, while he breathed, Cézannes would never sully his museum's walls. Alas for Aix, his pledge survived him. Of the artist it calls The Great Aixois, the city owns only a few minor miniatures. Today, Cézanne's former art school is the Musée Granet, a poetically just venue for his centenary exhibition: 120 Cézannes, many of his mountain, coming home from abroad for the first time since being painted. Cézanne once assured a critic that he would have the last laugh.

The artist's personal relationships always came second to his art, but, in 1869, he began a secret affair with one Hortense Fiquet. Their only child, Paul, was born three years later. Afraid for his allowance, for years he concealed both from his father. Even after their marriage in 1886, they rarely lived under the same roof. The couple tied the knot in Aix's grandiose 16th-century town hall, where, along with King René's sumptuous Book of Hours, reside all the documentary milestones - births, marriages and deaths - of the Cézanne family. But more seductive is the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, where, beneath the golden astronomical clock, café tables throng convivially around a Roman-columned fountain. Here, residents and tourists alike sip coffee and eat calissons, Aix's celebrated almond sweets. Radiating joie de vivre, Aix lives outdoors.

Cézanne's favourite haunts were the fashionable cafés of the city's Cours Mirabeau. Today, from morning to midnight, every table seems to be taken outside venerable brasseries such as Le Grillon, belle époque restaurants like the Bistro Romain, not to mention the historic café Les Deux Garçons, popular since 1792. Their opulent interiors remain unchanged from when, in his comic bowler hat, the ageing artist would sip an aperitif - on one famous evening, with both Monet and Renoir - and eat his favourite dish of potatoes in aïoli.

As dusk softly thickens, a busker's accordion combines with the tinkling of the fountains. Birds roost in the plane trees. "When you're born in Aix, nowhere else will do," said Cézanne. Yet, if his presence lingers anywhere, surely it is in the Bibémus quarries' birdsong-filled woods. Here, he rented a stone hut among the glowing ochre rocks from which Aix is built. Now kept like a sanctuary, with just one monthly guided visit, the tranquillity is preserved.

On the tiny terrace facing his mountain, he nurtured his vision: "Art must startle nature into permanence, render it eternal." The air is heady with lavender, rosemary and thyme. While we are there, his great-grandson Philippe brings plants that will bloom at his centenary.

Aged 58, Cézanne's infatuation with the Montagne Ste-Victoire had matured to monomania. With a stalker's sedulity, be bought a rustic studio on the lane up the Les Lauves hill - now rue Paul Cézanne. From the summit the artist had the perfect view of his peak, a view that, by his depicting it at least 87 times, would become iconic. Three steep kilometres from town, we have it to ourselves. At first, the view seems blocked by villas but then, wondrously, it opens up before us: the shimmering white pinnacle appears so familiar that it seems that nature is plagiarising art. Around the belvedere stand 10 reproductions of Cézanne Ste-Victoires, to be compared with the real thing. Pablo Picasso was so enamoured of Cézanne and his mountain that, in 1958, he bought the Château de Vauvenargues on its northern flank. He called Cézanne: "My only master - the father of us all."

As the 20th century began, Cézanne, after a 40-year endeavour, found himself becoming a success. Not, of course, in Aix. Abusive letters ranted that "his madness with a brush would stigmatise the city". But while Cézanne enjoyed the limelight, neither plaudits nor abuse blunted his resolve. At 5am each morning, pausing to pray at the cathedral, he limped to his studio to warm up on still lifes before tackling his mountain. He sensed impending fame - "I see my promised land" - yet feared that, "like Moses", he would get there too late. Indeed, having said that he hoped to die at his easel, he almost pulled it off. He was drenched in a thunderstorm while out painting his mountain on 15 October 1906. Six days later he died.

Apart from a visit by his son Paul, the studio remained undisturbed for the next 14 years, freezing in time Cézanne's final day. You feel he still might wander in. In 1954 it opened to a public keen to see his paints, his satchel, his brushes, his cane. Marilyn Monroe was among the first to visit, her tribute preserved in the guest book. Cézanne's coats and hats still hang just where he left them. Among some half-done Ste-Victoire paintings are sundry objects - vases, skulls, teapots - familiar from his still lifes. Here and there are intimate possessions: his pipe and his purse, a sepia snapshot of him happy with Monet, the wine glass on which, reputedly, his fingerprints remain.

In Aix's vast St-Pierre cemetery, no sign points the way to Paul Cézanne's grave. The old couple we ask don't recognise the name. But we finally find him, fittingly, just where his beloved Montagne Ste-Victoire's summit cranes into view.

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

GETTING THERE

Aix-en-Provence can be reached by Eurostar (08705 186 186; www.eurostar.com) and TGV from London Waterloo and Ashford via Lille or Paris. Marseille airport is 30km away and is served by Ryanair (0871 246 0000; www.ryanair.com), easyJet (0906 821 0906; www.easyJet.com) and British Airways (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com). To reduce the impact on the environment, you can buy an "offset" from Climate Care (01865 207 000; www.climatecare.org). The environmental cost of a return flight from London to Marseille is £1.65. The money funds sustainable energy and reforestation projects.

STAYING THERE

La Villa Gallici, Avenue de la Violette, Aix-en-Provence (00 33 4 42 23 29 23; www.villagallici.com). Doubles from €221 (£158), room only.

VISITING THERE

The "Cézanne in Provence" exhibition at the Musée Granet is from 9 June-17 September, admission €10 (£7) (www.cezanne-2006.com).

The "Steps of Cézanne" map is free at the tourist office (see below). Also, a 50km "Route de Cézanne" takes in villages where he painted. A five-hour bus tour on Thursday afternoon includes a peek at the Jas de Bouffan grounds, and costs €26 (£19).

Cézanne's Les Lauves Studio (00 33 4 42 21 06 53; www.atelier-cezanne.com). Admission €5.50 (£4), phone for opening hours, as they vary.

MORE INFORMATION

Aix-en Provence tourist information: 00 33 4 42 161 161; www.aixenprovencetourism.com

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