Plans to cut down trees and build 78 houses near a town west of Paris made famous by paintings by Paul Cezanne has amgered many. “While it is an exaggeration to claim, as some locals do, that the low, curving hill on the road to Claude Monet’s Giverny is the Ile de France’s answer to Aix’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, views of the village are as recognisable today from the opposite bank of the Seine as they were when Cézanne visited his childhood friend Emile Zola 120 years ago.”