L'Estaque

This guide to L'Estaque, the fishing hamlet above Marseille's harbor, opens in the winter of 1870 with a twenty-nine-year-old Paul Cézanne hiding out here with his model Marie-Hortense Fiquet, avoiding a wartime call-up his own father knew nothing about. It follows the secrets he kept from that same father for years afterward, and the plain way of seeing the red roofs and blue sea that took hold of him on this hillside. A small plaque to Cézanne still hangs on the chapel of Saint-Pierre behind the viewpoint.