Overlooking the southern French city of Aix-in-Provence is a brooding limestone monolith called Mont Ste. Victoire. Cezanne, neither impressionist nor cubist, made it the subject of many pictures that he painted as a reclusive and suspect native son of the city.

I say suspect, because in Barbara Corrado Pope’s book, “Cezanne’s Quarry,” the painter is a possible killer of a demimonde, M. Solange Vernet, who is found in a quarry at the foot of Mont Ste. Victoire, raped, knifed and strangled. The case is turned over to a young, inexperienced juge or judge who, as the lone French legal representative during hot Provençal August, is not sure what to do or how to carry on. His name is Bernard Martin.

As the investigation progresses, Pope, a historian at the University of Oregon, intertwines the real facts of Cezanne’s life with her fictional characters. We learn of Cezanne’s 14-year liaison with Hortense Fiquet which has resulted in a son. Cezanne’s search for a pictorial language to match his mind’s view is carefully described. Over all is Mont Ste. Victoire, the subject of many of Cezanne’s paintings.

Martin is aided in his search for the murderer by Inspector Franc, broad, bulky, powerful, in contrast to the slim Bernard Martin. Throughout the book, Martin and Franc maneuver to find the killer of Solange Vernet, the juge using intelligence and persistence, the inspector using power, cruelty and aggression.

The plot is complicated by the other suspect, Vernet’s lover, an English geologist, who is a Darwinian. In France in 1885, Darwin’s theory was still anathema, a slight against the Church, making Charles Westbury a person to be closely watched by Franc.

Westbury and Vernet had set up a salon, a place for intelligent people to come to discuss authors such as Darwin and, perhaps, Emile Zola, the foremost French novelist of the time. Zola happens to be a friend of Cezanne, having met the painter a long time ago in Aix-in-Provence. They had walked the riverbank together, promising each other eternal friendship.

Zola in “Cezanne’s Quarry” comes to Aix to help his friend. He meets with Bernard Martin and tries hard to convince the young judge that the painter would never commit murder. His personality would not permit it, even though Cezanne violently destroyed canvasses that were not worthy and even though Martin had found a fragment of one such work in the quarry near the body.

The next year in real history, Zola will write a novel called L’Oeuvre, about an artist, loosely based upon Cezanne. Later yet Zola will defend Dreyfus, unjustly convicted of treason because he was a Jew, and the commotion will disrupt staid France.

Solange Vernet herself was a sign that France was changing. Cezanne’s art would lead to Picasso. Vernet, her salon, her “friendship” with Westbury, and her background were all signs of the social changes coming. Vernet had been an uneducated girl from a small town in the north near Paris. Aligned with a haymaker to the rich, she eventually made enough money to come south and become a woman of means. And now she was dead.

Bernard Martin changes throughout the novel from an insecure, diffident member of the judiciary to one who finally realizes what he has to do. His life is complicated by his mother’s insistence that he marry the daughter of the rich landowner whom Martin’s family owes money to.

Pope delineates the French society of the time quite clearly as straight-laced, rigid and unconforming. Yet Martin must balance all of the forces acting on him: Franc’s insistence that Westbury is guilty; Cezanne’s poor alibi and fascination with Vernet; the Provençal summer heat; and a need to solve the murder before other judges return from the traditional French August vacation.

Martin resolves his own dilemmas. He solves the case through the adroit use of modern technology, the telegraph, and not by Franc’s crude methods. He also frees himself from his mother’s whine about getting married. If the solution to the murder is quick, it is at least resolved, and the denouement is in the quarry under the mountain.

Along with these events Pope is craftily giving the reader a synopsis of Cezanne as a painter. Unsuccessful until now (and it will be another ten years before he is finally noticed in Paris), Cezanne is struggling with his craft and vision as well as his squalid home life.

All Cezanne wants to do is paint. Westbury and his Darwinian notions are to Cezanne superficial. The reality is the brooding immensity of Mont Ste. Victoire and talking about the mountain after collecting paltry specimens of rock is nothing compared to Cezanne’s paintings of the monolith.

Hortense has waited 14 years for Cezanne to marry her. He won’t, as his invalid father might disinherit him. His mother and sister despair of him due to his painting but come together when he is a suspect in the murder case. Gradually throughout the book, Pope gives a reasonable solution to Cezanne marrying Hortense and then becoming the great painter we know.

Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He can be reached at rmohr1565@charter.net.