information:highlighting, stylistic:tone
L'Estaque – Auvers-sur-Oise – Pontoise 1870–1874

On 31 May 1870, Cézanne was best man at Zola's wedding in Paris. During the Franco-Prussian War, Cézanne and Hortense Fiquet lived in the fishing village of L'Estaque near Marseille, which Cézanne would later visit and paint frequently, as the place's Mediterranean atmosphere fascinated him. He avoided conscription for military service. Although Cézanne had been denounced as a deserter in January 1871, he managed to hide. No further details are known as documents from this period are missing.

After the Paris Commune was crushed the couple returned to Paris in May 1871. Paul fils, the son of Paul Cézanne and Hortense Fiquet was born on 4 January 1872. Cézanne's mother was kept a party to family events, but his father was not informed of Hortense for fear of risking his wrath and so as not to lose the financial allowances that his father gave him to live as an artist. The artist received from his father a monthly allowance of 100 francs.

When Cézanne's friend, the crippled painter Achille Emperaire, sought refuge with the family in Paris in 1872 due to financial hardship, he soon left his friend however " it was necessary, otherwise I would not have escaped the fate of the others. I found him here abandoned by everyone. Zola, Solari and all the others are no longer mentioned. He's the strangest guy imaginable."

From late 1872 to 1874, Cézanne lived with Hortense and their son Paul in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he met the doctor and art lover Paul Gachet, later the painter Vincent van Gogh 's doctor. Gachet was also an ambitious hobby painter and made his studio available to Cézanne.

In 1872, Cézanne accepted an invitation from his friend Pissarro to work in Pontoise in the Oise Valley. Pissarro, as a sensitive artist, became a mentor to the shy, irritable Cézanne, whome he was able to persuade to turn away from the darker colours, and gave him advice to "Always only paint with the three primary colours (red, yellow, blue) and their immediate deviations," and refrain from linear contouring, defining shapes from the gradation of the colour tonal values. Cézanne felt that the Impressionist technique was bringing him closer to his goal and heeded his friend's advice. Pissarro later reported: "We were always together, but still each of us kept what counts alone: our own feelings."