Charles de Lannoy launches an invasion of Provence, commanded by Don Fernando d'Avalos and Charles de Bourbon, crossing the Alps in early July with nearly eleven thousand men.

The Spanish-Imperial forces capture and sack most of the smaller towns of Provence, and finally Charles de Bourbon enters the provincial capital of Aix-en-Provence on August 9, taking the title of Count of Provence.

The increasing interaction of the Waldenses with the Protestant churches has brought the them to the attention of the authorities.

The Parlement of Provence issues the Arrêt de Mérindol on November 18, 1541, ordering the destruction of the villages of Lourmarin, Mérindol, and Cabriéres in the Luberon, because their inhabitants are Vaudois, of Italian Piedmontese origin, and are not considered sufficiently orthodox Catholics.

Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a French antiquary and savant, has the use of a telescope newly purchased by his patron, Guillaume du Vair, president of the Parlement of Provence.

Peiresc and Joseph Gaultier use this for observing the skies.

Peiresc discovers the Orion Nebula in 1610; Gaultier becomes the second person to see it in the telescope.

Peiresc and Gaultier observe the moons of Jupiter in November 1610; Peiresc’s courtly suggestion that individual names from the Medici family be applied to these "Medicean stars" is not taken up.

...the area of Aix and ...

Paul Cézanne, after a phase of uneasy dissension among the Impressionists, withdraws from the movement in 1878 in order “to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums.”

In contrast to the passing show depicted by the Impressionists, his approach imbues landscape and still life with a monumental permanence and coherence.

He abandons the Impressionists' virtuoso depiction of evanescent light effects in his preoccupation with the underlying structures of natural forms and the problem of unifying surface patterns with spatial depth.

Again rejected by the Salon, Cézanne moves in 1878 to Aix-en-Provence, where he has to endure the insults of his tyrannical father, whose financial help he needs to survive since his canvases are still not finding buyers.

He works in Aix and ...

Paul Cézanne had exhibited Portrait of M.L.A. at the Salon as a “pupil of Guillemet.”

He has spent most of the year in Paris, but had visited Émile Zola at Médan, and returns to Aix in October where he works at the Jas de Bouffan.

Paul Cézanne spends most of the year around Aix; from May to November he works in L'Estaque, and meets up with Renoir and Monet working on the Riviera.

Paul Cézanne works in L'Estaque, Aix and Cardanne.

During June and July, he takes his family to stay with the Renoirs at La Roche-Guyon, and visits Zola in Médan.

During this period, he paints a number of striking landscapes, including the prismatic work The Mills of Gardanne (c. 1885).

Paul Cézanne, now forty-seven, completes Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan (1885-86; Minneapolis Museum of Art).

In depicting the winter-bare chestnut trees, which line an avenue on the grounds of his family estate at Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne employs multiple viewpoints; this collapses depth, meshing the two parallel rows of trees into a web that seems to exist in one plane.

This characteristic innovation produces a rhythmic synthesis of form in both two and three dimensions.

In April, he finally marries Marie-Hortense Fiquet (Madame Cézanne en bleu, c. 1886, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), his mistress of seventeen years and the mother of his son.

He receives an inheritance following the death of his father six months later.

Paul Cézanne, now financially independent, spends most of 1887 working in and around Aix.