AN ELDERLY woman emerged from her house in the village of Les Hauts des Issambres in southern Provence, and pointed a trembling hand at the landscapes made famous by Cézanne.

The colours cherished by the Impressionists — the warm amber tones, the greens and the bright blues — had disappeared beneath blackened desolation.

She stood silently for a few seconds, gazing at the aftermath of the fiercest forest fire in recent French history. Then she whispered. “Don’t go up there. There’s nothing left. It’s all been destroyed.”

Flames fanned by the Mistral blowing down the Rhône Valley had consumed swaths of bone-dry forests, leaping from pine tree to pine tree as they raced down the hills towards the Mediterranean. Almost 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres) were destroyed in an evening that left much of one of Europe’s most beautiful regions looking like a scene from Dante or Goethe.

This area of Provence is now dark and menacing with sombre trees standing on black hillsides. Smoke is still rising from the ground, and the smell is acrid and pervasive. To the north, two fires were still burning last night, forcing the evacuation of 1,000 people from a campsite near the village of La Motte.

The residents of Les Hauts des Issambres were fortunate, the flames moved around the village, which is surrounded by woods but has few trees itself. The cream-coloured walls of their houses were charred: their flowers were singed: some cars exploded. But they escaped with their lives, and were yesterday gazing on a landscape that Cézanne would barely recognise.

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