Notes

Notes

 

Chapters

Chapters
688 1. "I am like a fish" Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, l. 182, late November 1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, pp. 283-284: "Je suis à Arles tout dépaysé, tellement je trouve tout petit, mesquin, le paysage et le gens." The first clause is often translated "I am quite homesick in Arles," but the original emphasizes Gauguin's distaste for his current circumstance over a longing for elsewhere, so we have used Guérin's translation (quoted in Silverman, p. 461, n. 8). 2. Gauguin could not say exactlyGauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 32: The question was rhetorical: "How long did we remain together? I couldn't say, I have entirely forgotten. In spite of the swiftness with which the catastrophe approached, in spite of the fever of work that had seized me, the time seemed to me a century." 3. "the time seemed to me" Gauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 32. 4. he might remain a year Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 174, 10/25/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 264: Gauguin wrote Émile Schuffenecker soon after arriving in Arles: "Yes, I have got over my difficulties and I believe in the future. In addition to having my material existence secured here for a year, longer if need be." He writes the same thing to Theo in mid-November (see Ch. 36, n. 6). However, to his wife Mette, Gauguin had written before arriving in Arles that he planned to spend "six months with a painter who will provide me with food and lodging in exchange for drawings" (Paul Gauguin to Mette Gauguin-Gad, l. 161, late August 1888, quoted in Druick and Zegers, p. 133). 5. Vincent had imagined he would stay BVG 544a, 10/3/1888.

Context:
JLB 695, 10/3/1888: "I must tell you that even while working I never cease to think about this enterprise of setting up a studio with yourself and me as permanent residents, but which we'd both wish to make into a shelter and a refuge for our pals at moments when they find themselves at an impasse in their struggle."

6. talk of departing in a few months Gauguin, in Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, pp. 137, 139: In mid-November, only two to three weeks after arriving in Arles, Gauguin wrote Schuffenecker: "You will say that I am still a crazy optimist, but if I succeed in selling a little, I plan to save enough to return to Martinique next year, but with some money this time. I am convinced this is a good way forward for me." (Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 184, c. 11/23/1888.) By "next year," Gauguin could mean as early as January or February 1889, only a few months away. On his previous trip to the Caribbean, in 1887, he had left in February. He may have confided this shorter time frame to Schuffenecker, but to Theo -- and, undoubtedly, to Vincent -- he continued to affirm the original one-year commitment: "I greatly hope that a year from now I will be strong enough to return to the tropics to attack, this time for good." (Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 181, 11/14/1888.) However, this confirmation appears to be designed specifically to allay concerns expressed by Theo -- no doubt originating with Vincent -- that Gauguin might leave Arles sooner than initially planned. That would explain this defensive statement immediately after the confirmation to Theo: "But to do so [i.e., leave for the tropics], I'll need to save up a bit of money; so it's best that we wait to speak about this. This damned Midi sun has you always making plans ... " (ibid.). This sounds suspiciously like an effort to paper over the growing rift in the Yellow House with humor. In any event, it succeeded in quelling Vincent's suspicions. In late November Vincent wrote his brother: "I think we'll find it best to change nothing, absolutely nothing, in the financial arrangement we've established. If at the end of a year we continue to find it satisfactory, time will tell." (JLB 722, 11/21/1888.) 7. "soon" Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 192, c. 12/19/1888-12/20/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, pp. 301-302: "My nostalgia for the West Indies is ever growing and I shall naturally be going back over there just as soon as I've made some sales." 8. "hurtling along at top speed" Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 184, c. 11/23/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 291. 9. "The good Vincent" Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 188, c. early December 1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 298: "The good Vincent and the grieche Gauguin continue to make a happy couple and eat at home the little meals they prepare themselves." According to Druick and Zegers, the obscure term "grieche," meaning grumpy or disagreeable (Druick and Zegers, p. 87). (Merlhès translates it "cantankerous"; it is related to the pie-grieche -- "a butcherbird, which impales its prey on thorns before devouring it" [Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 182].) In the January 1888 La Revue indépendante, critic Félix Fénéon had disparaged Gauguin as "ce grieche artiste" (that prickly artist) apparently referring to his on-going feud with the Neo-Impressionists, whom Fénéon championed. To Theo (and Schuffenecker), Gauguin defused the attack by co-opting the term in a light-hearted, self-deprecatory vein. The ploy succeeded in masking the tension in the Yellow House. Undoubtedly relieved and either astonishingly naïve or disingenuous, Theo wrote back: "I was happy to learn you get on well living together and have both now been able to get down to work. I would very much like to be with you." (Theo van Gogh to Paul Gauguin, 11/13/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 281) 10. "not to launch my attack" Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 184, c. 11/23/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 291. 11. "independence" BVG 571, 1/17/1889. Here Vincent reveals not only Gauguin's complaint, but also Vincent's response -- a argument ("let him go his own way, as it seems to him that he knows it better than we do") that echoes his lashing out at Van Rappard when he, too, abandoned Vincent, over The Potato Eaters (F 78 JH 734): "What you say about my needing somebody to get things into my head -- maybe -- but at the same time it could be that I myself am the person to get things into my own head" (JLB 516, 7/15/1885; emphasis in original; see Chapter 23).

Context:
BVG 571, 1/17/1889: "But as for him ... Lord, let him do anything he wants, let him have his independence?? (whatever he means by that) and his opinions, and let him go his own way as soon as he thinks he knows it better than we do."
JLB 736, 1/17/1889: "But as for him ... upon my word, let him do what he wants, let him have his independences????? (in what way does he consider his character independent), his opinions ... and let him go his own way, as it seems to him that he knows it better than we do."

12. he buried his head BVG 560, 12/4/1888. This is a new and different formulation of Gauguin's work effort, which elsewhere Vincent always describes as a shared one: "Our days pass in working, working always, in the evening we're worn out and go to the café before retiring to bed early. That's our existence." (JLB 723, 12/1/1888.) This suggests a new element of separation and exclusion. Even as early as mid-November, however, one can hear alienation in Vincent's description of working alongside Gauguin in the Yellow House: "The weather's windy and rainy here, and I'm very happy not to be alone, I work from memory on bad days, and that wouldn't work if I were alone" (JLB 718, 11/10/1888). Vincent invokes the minimal pleasure of a warm body nearby, not the thrill of camaraderie that he had imagined.

Context:
JLB 723, 12/1/1888: "Gauguin works a lot -- I very much like a still life with yellow background and foreground."

13. "peace and quiet" Silverman, p. 267. 14. Gauguin apparently succeeded BVG 560, 12/4/1888: By itself, this would not support the inference that Vincent ended up painting in the kitchen rather than side-by-side with Gauguin in the front room of the Yellow House. But it had been Vincent's intention from the start to have two separate studios downstairs when Gauguin came: "the studio and another room, also a studio, but a kitchen at the same time" (JLB 677, 9/9/1888). He had already painted at least a few works in the kitchen before Gauguin's arrival, and this was the obvious solution of first resort for tensions between the two artists. Vincent would have accepted the humiliation gladly if he thought the other option was for Gauguin to leave altogether. Druick and Zegers make the argument that despite his original scheme, Vincent would not have used the kitchen "because of the disorderly housekeeping" (Druick and Zegers, p. 160). But judging by all reports of his studios, including Gauguin's, Vincent was not the kind of person who minded working in a mess. In this regard generally, see Vincent's boast to sister Wil a year later: "I try to paint in such a way that it looks good in a kitchen, then sometimes I notice that it looks well in a drawing room too, but I never bother myself about that." (JLB 812, 10/21/1889)

Context:
JLB 723, 12/1/1888: "I don't find it disagreeable to try to work from the imagination, since that permits me not to go out. Working in the heat of a stove doesn't bother me, but the cold isn't for me, as you know."

689 15. His enthusiasm wanderedDruick and Zegers, p. 246: "Gauguin's enthusiasm was clearly flagging. His portrait of Monsieur [Joseph] Ginoux is halfhearted; its size, unfinished state, and support (a commercially primed canvas supplied by Vincent) suggest that he may have involved himself only at Vincent's instigation. His landscape efforts also reveal increasing disengagement." Druick and Zegers go on to describe a Gauguin landscape from this time as "delicate but insubstantial, lacking the synthetic rigor of its November predecessors. ... This Arles landscape is less suggestive of a retrenchment or return to earlier ideas than it is of distractedness. ... His thoughts were elsewhere, as Vincent was now painfully aware." 16. He left sketches undeveloped Druick and Zegers, p. 222: Gauguin's surviving preparatory sketches for paintings from this period (pictured in ibid., p. 225 and p. 247) are notably desultory. Druick and Zegers rightly call them "notations" (ibid., p. 222). 17. and paintings unfinished Druick and Zegers, p. 246. (See Ch. 36, n. 15.) This would explain Vincent's odd comment in a letter from early November: "At the moment [Gauguin is] working on some women in a vineyard, entirely from memory, but if he doesn't spoil it or leave it there unfinished it will be very fine and very strange" (JLB 717, 11/3/1888). 18. He relied more and moreDruick and Zegers, p. 246: "[Gauguin's] appetite was gone, and he was thinking of Brittany. Blue Trees ('Vous ypasserez, la belle!') started out as a remembrance of a [Jules] Breton scene painted the previous spring, which likewise features a row of blue trees set against a similarly proportioned landscape and yellow sky." Druick and Zegers also point out that the "compositional structure and stylistic vocabulary" of Gauguin's Arles Landscape with Two Dogs, from early December, "align it with the Breton landscape that Theo so admired [The Aven River at Pont-Aven]." Roskill notes that two canvases of Washerwomen Gauguin completed in December employed "sketches of a kneeling washerwoman at work and one walking away in his Breton notebook of 1886, and he had put a related pair of figures into a landscape of that year" (Roskill, p. 149). Only the Arlesian costume was based on sketches done in Arles (ibid.). (Pickvance argues from Vincent's letters (JLB 722, 11/21/1888) and (JLB 723, 12/1/1888) that there was only one version of Washerwomen [Pickvance, pp. 220-221].) Rewald, citing Washerwomen and Woman against a Haystack (also known as In the Heat or The Pigs), comments that, "many of [Gauguin's] pictures done there [in Arles] could almost have been painted in Brittany. ... [Their] costumes alone testify to their Provençal origin." (Rewald, pp. 236-237.) 19. borrowed from Vincent's workPickvance, p. 221: "Just as Garden at Arles is clearly based on the public gardens in front of van Gogh's house in the Place Lamartine, and can be interpreted as Gauguin's summary in one picture of van Gogh's garden series, so his Washerwomen can be said to represent a summing up of van Gogh's images of washerwomen. The venue can be named specifically. It is the same Roubine du Roi, viewed strictly from bank level, depicted in van Gogh's June painting." 20. brief encounter with the ZouaveSee Chapter 34. 21. "[then] I shall go" Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, l. 178, c. 11/9/1888-11/12/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, pp. 274-275. 22. "I will even buy a house" Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, l. 178, c. 11/9/1888-11/12/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, pp. 274-275. (See Druick and Zegers, p. 216, for translation.) 23. his own great project Because of Gauguin's famous subsequent trip to Tahiti in 1891, chroniclers understandably make much of Vincent's and Gauguin's discussions of the so-called "studio of the tropics" in the last week of October 1888. By this route, the literature often characterizes Gauguin's later South Pacific trip as fulfillment of Vincent's obsessive ambitions for an art of the South and, thereby, Gauguin's Tahitian art as inevitably joined to Vincent's Midi imagery. Druick and Zegers, for example, attribute to Vincent the first mention of "the South's creative potential" after Gauguin's arrival in Arles (Druick and Zegers, p. 183). And "from this starting point," they continue, "the Studio of the South concept blossomed at once into talk of a parallel project in the tropics." Druick and Zegers argue that "Gauguin acknowledged [the idea] was Vincent's" (ibid.). Their support is a passage in a letter Gauguin wrote Bernard in late October or early November: "Now that the way is prepared by Van Gogh, I believe it is possible for all talented artists of our group to get on their feet" (ibid., p. 385; n. 68; Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, c. 11/2/1888). But the context clearly indicates that this refers to Theo -- whose promotion and monetary support had opened the door for Gauguin and other artists and on whose efforts Gauguin was depending to fund the Martinique trip -- not to Vincent, whom Gauguin still considered peripheral to his ambitions.

Druick and Zegers also cite a postscript that Gauguin wrote at the end of a letter from Vincent to Émile Bernard in early November: "[Vincent's] idea about the future of a new generation of painters in the tropics seems absolutely correct, and I am still thinking about going back there when I have the resources. Who knows, with a little luck?" (JLB 698, 10/5/1888; Druick and Zegers, p. 216; Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, c. 11/2/1888.) But the passage, which was meant for Vincent's eyes as much as for Bernard's, only politely seconds Vincent's missionary rhetoric. Vincent had been preaching the allure of "the tropics" -- a term that, for him, embraced almost every exotic clime from Arles to Japan -- and Gauguin's note does not suggest any newer, narrower, or more imperative vision. In fact, as the postscript suggests ("I am still thinking"), Gauguin brought the idea of returning to Martinique with him to the Yellow House, as can be seen in his first Arles letters to Bernard and Schuffenecker as well as in Vincent's first report of his conversations with the newcomer: "[Gauguin will] even be able to put some money aside, the more he sells. Which, in a year, let's say, he can use to settle in Martinique, and which he couldn't put aside otherwise." (JLB 715, 10/29/1888.) Gauguin probably revealed his plan to Vincent in much the same terms as he expressed it to Bernard around the same time: "I will even buy a house there in which to establish a studio where friends could find an easy life for next to nothing." (See Ch. 36, n. 22.)

Although Gauguin, the eternal magpie, undoubtedly borrowed some self-aggrandizing formulations from Vincent ("a new generation of painters"), this is essentially the same vision of an artists' paradise in the tropics with which Gauguin had lured Charles Laval to Panama and Taboga in 1887 (see Chapter 33). Vincent, in his usual ardor of solidarity, immediately overlaid on Gauguin's plan his own vision of a Studio of the South, but also immediately saw it as pre-emptive of his dream for the Yellow House (JLB 714, 10/27/1888 or 10/28/1888). (He had, after all, spent much of the spring and summer convincing Theo as well as Gauguin and Bernard that Arles and Japan and Martinique were all part of the same mythic South.)

As long as Gauguin's departure was not imminent ("in a year, let's say"), Vincent was able to affect enthusiasm for this "parallel" paradise, and his enthusiasm assumed the same viscous form and rhetoric as his plans for the Midi. "What Gauguin has to say about the tropics seems wonderful to me," he wrote Theo. "Surely the future of a great renaissance in painting lies there." (ibid.) But Vincent could not help but see the implication of this sentence: i.e., that the future of the "great renaissance" lay in the tropics with Gauguin; not in Arles with Vincent. That he saw this threat from the start is apparent even in his early "advocacy" of Gauguin's plan. When he explains it to Theo, interestingly, he does not urge his brother to enlist other artists to Gauguin's tropical studio, but instead proposes a third alternative: "Just ask your new Dutch friends [Meijer Isaac de Haan and Joseph Jacob Isaäcson] if they've ever thought how interesting it would be if a few Dutch painters were to found a colourist school in Java" (ibid.; emphasis added). This shows Vincent's reluctance already in October to recruit Theo to Gauguin's cause. He also emphatically disavows any desire to join Gauguin's future studio -- "I regret not being ten or twenty years younger; I'd certainly go" (nonsense, given Gauguin's age) -- but instead quickly formulates a new role for the Yellow House that is complementary to Gauguin's vision: "Now not very likely that I'll move from the coast, and the little yellow house here in Arles will remain what it is, a halfway house between Africa and the tropics and the people of the north" (ibid.).

But the fundamental incompatibility of the two plans -- and the threat that Gauguin's ambitions would undermine Theo's commitment to the Yellow House -- was inescapable. Even as it attributes Gauguin's plans to Vincent's influence, the literature on the Studio of the Tropics recognizes that Vincent foresaw the frustration of his own dreams in the fulfillment of Gauguin's: "As Gauguin's idea of a voyage to the tropics crystallized, Vincent's malaise grew" (Druick and Zegers, p. 221). "The atmosphere in the studio was overcast by the threats Vincent perceived to his dream of a Studio of the South" (ibid.). "Whenever the topic arose [Vincent] began to get edgy and difficult. Unfortunately, Gauguin merely put this down to his general moodiness and made no connection between his talk of leaving and his friend's curious bursts of ill-temper" (Sweetman, p. 210).

24. "What Gauguin tells of the tropics" BVG 558b, 10/28/1888.

Context:
BVG 558b, 10/28/1888: " What Gauguin tells of the tropics seems marvellous to me. Surely the future of a great renaissance in painting lies there."
JLB 714, 10/27/1888 or 10/28/1888: " What Gauguin has to say about the tropics seems wonderful to me. There, certainly, is the future of a great renaissance of painting."

25. "Surely the future" BVG 558b, 10/28/1888.

Context:
JLB 714, 10/27/1888 or 10/28/1888: "There, certainly, is the future of a great renaissance of painting."

26. "homesick for the tropics" BVG 559, 11/6/1888: Bonger translates this more literally.

Context:
BVG 559, 11/6/1888: "If they ever came here Gauguin would certainly say to them -- go to Java for impressionist work. For Gauguin though he works hard here is still homesick for hot countries."
JLB 717, 11/3/1888: "If ever they came here, Gauguin would certainly say to them: go to Java and do some Impressionism. Because Gauguin, while he works hard here, always has a nostalgic longing for hot countries."

27. "Between the two of us" Gauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 124: We have altered Stein's translation to simplify some of Gauguin's poetic liberties and aggrandized locutions: "Between the two beings, he and I, the one entirely a volcano and the other, boiling as well, but inside. Some sort of struggle was bound to occur." 28. "flatterers" Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 181, 11/14/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 283: "Give my kindest regards to Degas and tell him how flattered I am by his praise, given that in my opinion he is the best judge." Theo captured the pitch of Degas's praise in a letter to his sister Wil in early December: "Degas very much likes Gauguin's work. To the point that he is tempted to go and drop in on him in Arles. 'Are they happy!!' Degas says when speaking of Vincent and Gauguin, 'That's the life!' There is no need to tell you what that means, coming from the great Degas who understands life in all its diversity so well." (Theo van Gogh to Willemina van Gogh, 12/6/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 298.) This is more reliable than some of Theo's other reports because, with his sister, he is neither in his supportive salesman mode (toward Gauguin), nor his protective brother mode (toward Vincent). 29. "got wind of my success" Gauguin, quoted in Druick and Zegers, pp. 213-214. 30. requests for Gauguin to approve Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 187, c. 12/4/1888-12/7/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 294: We infer a missing request of this sort from Gauguin's reply to Theo in early December: "I accept the prices indicated." 31. "the richness and abundance" Émile Schuffenecker to Paul Gauguin, 12/11/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 299. 32. through its connection The connection ran through Les Vingt's director, Octave Maus (1856-1919), who was also the editor of L'Art Moderne. As Druick and Zegers summarize, Gauguin had been around the art world long enough to have a history with Maus: " Les Vingt had on two occasions included works by Neo-Impressionists ([Georges] Seurat and [Camille] Pissarro in 1887; [Paul] Signac and Albert Dubois-Pillet in 1888) but had acted as if Gauguin did not exist. Moreover Maus, also co-editor of the influential periodical L'Art Moderne, was one of the reviewers who in 1886 had mis-identified Gauguin as an Impressionist apprentice newcomer." (Druick and Zegers, pp. 213-214.) 33. an invitation to exhibit Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 187, c. 12/4/1888-12/7/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 294: "I received an invitation from the Revue Indépendante and here's a copy of my reply. Do not be astonished by this refusal which can do you no harm. I consider this hole of an exhibition as being capable of harming us, whatever way you look at it." Gauguin's "regret" to the Revue is a marvelous example of his savage drollery: "I am mystified by the honor you accord me by your invitation to exhibit my Martinique work on the premises of the Revue Indépendante. I regret I am unable to accept an invitation that my friend Schuffenecker sought for himself in vain. ... During the last 2 years, feeling my artistic powers to be quite inadequate in the face of the innovative advancements made by the impressionists who were themselves so rapidly superseded by the neo-impressionists, I resolved to work well away from any group-oriented publicity. These tropical studies are insufficient as an exact record of nature and I consider the Revue Indépendante would be powerless to lend them the brilliance and luminosity they lack." (Gauguin, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 182.) Of course, it is possible that Gauguin only drafted this letter for the benefit of his wounded friend Schuffenecker and, for political reasons, never mailed it. 34. enemies had laid a trap Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, l. 178, c. 11/9/1888-11/12/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, pp. 274-275. 690 35. "a serious exhibition in opposition" Gauguin, quoted in Druick and Zegers, pp. 213, 214: In December (1888), Gauguin wrote Schuffenecker laying the groundwork for what would become the "Volpini Show," an exhibition of Impressionists and Synthetists held in the Café Volpini at the Universal Exhibition in 1889 (Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 184, 11/22/1888-11/12/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 189. The show included not only Gauguin and Schuffenecker, but also Bernard, Charles Laval and others. In the December letter, Gauguin lists Vincent among those artists who should be invited to participate ("a little group of comrades"); but, in fact, Vincent did not exhibit any works at the Volpini show. It ran during the summer of 1889 (see Chapter 37). 36. "My business affairs are heading" Paul Gauguin to Mette Gauguin-Gad, 1. 190, c. mid-December 1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 300: Gauguin also sent his wife money -- an inversion of Vincent's long financial dependence on his brother that undoubtedly registered disturbingly with Vincent (Gauguin to Theo, c. December 4-7, 1888). 37. He sent friends a new photograph Druick and Zegers, p. 214: "As if to update his friends on the artistic persona behind these achievements, he sent out a recent photograph of his 'savage countenance.'" 38. "savage countenance" Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 184, c. 11/23/1888, in Merlhès , Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 291: "Enclosed herein, a photo of my savage's face. It will remind you of the good friend." 39. "It is absolutely necessary" Gauguin and Van Gogh, p. 30. 40. "We are having wind" BVG 561, 11/12/1888.

Context:
BVG 561, 11/12/1888: " We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone."
JLB 718, 11/10/1888: " The weather's windy and rainy here, and I'm very happy not to be alone, I work from memory on bad days, and that wouldn't work if I were alone."

41. "Gauguin is already thinking" BVG 560, 12/4/1888. We have abbreviated Vincent's baroque construction (see context).

Context:
BVG 560, 12/4/1888: "You know that Gauguin is invited to exhibit at the 'Vingtistes.' He is already imagining settling in Brussels, and that certainly would be a means towards his being able to see his Danish wife again."
JLB 723, 12/1/1888: "You know that Gauguin has been invited to exhibit at the Vingtistes. His imagination is already leading him to think of settling in Brussels, which would indeed be a means of finding himself in a position to see his Danish wife again."

42. Gauguin's obligations to his family BVG 536, 9/11/1888: Even before Gauguin's arrival, Vincent considered his family attachments a potential threat to their long-term combination. In January 1889, after Gauguin left, Vincent again raised the issue as a reason for Gauguin's departure, suggesting that it had, indeed, been the subject of anxiety, and probably conversation, during Gauguin's stay: "He's the father of children, then he has his wife and his children in Denmark, and at the same time he wants to go right to the other end of the globe to Martinique. It's horrifying, all the vice versa of incompatible desires and needs which that must cause him." (JLB 736, 1/17/1889.)

Context:
JLB 679, 9/10/1888: "Gauguin is married, and it's very important to be aware beforehand that in the long run it's not certain that different interests will be compatible."

43. the usual strains of creative life BVG 565, 12/23/1888.

Context:
JLB 724, 12/11/1888: "Gauguin is very powerful, strongly creative, but just because of that he must have peace. Will he find it anywhere if he does not find it here? I am waiting for him to make a decision with absolute serenity."

44. "I think myself that Gauguin" BVG 565, 12/23/1888.

Context:
BVG 565, 12/23/1888: " I think myself that Gauguin was a little out of sorts with the good town of Arles, the little yellow house where we work, and especially with me. As a matter of fact there are bound to be for him as for me further grave difficulties to overcome here."
JLB 724, 12/11/1888: " I myself think that Gauguin had become a little disheartened by the good town of Arles, by the little yellow house where we work, and above all by me. Indeed, there are bound to be grave difficulties still to overcome here, for him as well as for me."

45. he rented two additional rooms BVG 570, 1/9/1889: Vincent does not confess this to Theo until January, after Gauguin's departure. Vincent claims, in retrospect, that he took on this additional burden (without telling his brother) because he imagined that other artists would join him and Gauguin in Arles "had Gauguin himself stayed longer with me." This may or may not be the real reason, but it was clearly an act of denial in regard to Gauguin's threatened departure.

Context:
JLB 735, 1/9/1889: "I'd even rented two little rooms which were coming vacant in the house which I currently have the whole of (the rent is 21.50 francs a month). I daren't press the point any more, seeing as Gauguin has gone."

46. "Before doing anything" BVG 565, 12/23/1888.

Context:
BVG 565, 12/23/1888: "Altogether I think that either he will definitely go, or else definitely stay. Before doing anything I told him to think it over and reckon things up again."
JLB 724, 12/11/1888: "All in all, I think personally that he'll either definitely go or he'll definitely stay. I told him to think and do his sums again before acting."

47. Seeing doubt BVG 573, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: In fact, Gauguin's mind was not divided at all. The division existed entirely in Vincent's imagination.

Context:
JLB 741, 1/22/1889: "Prior to the last days I could see only one thing, that he was working with his heart divided between the desire to go to Paris to carry out his plans, and life in Arles."

48. "good reasons" BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889. Vincent admits this in a letter to Gauguin the next month (January 1889) after the latter's precipitous departure from Arles right before Christmas: "Now I feel remorse at having perhaps, I who so insisted that you should stay here to await events and gave you so many good reasons for doing so, now I feel remorse at having indeed perhaps prompted your departure -- unless, however, that departure was premeditated beforehand? And that then it was perhaps up to me to show that I still had the right to be kept frankly au courant." (JLB 739, 1/21/1889.) Note how paranoia sweeps over this confession and overlays it with suspicion and a contrary coda of resentment. In the last sentence, Vincent essentially takes back the apology for his badgering, asserting that he should have insisted more vehemently on being included in Gauguin's pre-departure planning. In short, he was not wrong to be vehement, he just directed his vehemence to the wrong end.

Context:
BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: "I reproach myself now that it was I -- perhaps insisting too much that you stay on here to await events and giving you so many good reasons for doing so -- I reproach myself now that perhaps it was I who was the cause of your departure -- unless, of course, that departure was planned beforehand?"
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "Now I feel remorse at having perhaps, I who so insisted that you should stay here to await events and gave you so many good reasons for doing so, now I feel remorse at having indeed perhaps prompted your departure -- unless, however, that departure was premeditated beforehand?"

49. he insisted that Gauguin BVG 571, 1/17/1889: This is certainly the sense of Vincent's later (January 1889) report to Theo.

Context:
JLB 736, 1/17/1889: "I had dared to assure him that if he'd stayed quietly with us, working here in Arles without wasting money, earning it, since you were busying yourself with his paintings, his wife would certainly have written to him and would have approved of his quiet life. There's still more besides, there's the fact that he was sick and seriously ill, and that it was a question of discovering both the illness and the remedy. Now here his pains had already ceased."

50. "in pain and seriously ill" BVG 571, 1/17/1889: Vincent reports this to Theo in January 1889, after Gauguin's departure. We have inferred that he made the same arguments to Gauguin at the time, and have changed the tense accordingly.

Context:
BVG 571, 1/17/1889: "There is more besides; he had been in pain and seriously ill, and the thing was to discover the disease and the remedy. Now here his pains had already ceased."
JLB 736, 1/17/1889: "There's still more besides, there's the fact that he was sick and seriously ill, and that it was a question of discovering both the illness and the remedy. Now here his pains had already ceased."

51. "thirty times better" BVG 563, 11/23/1888. Vincent wrote this after Gauguin's canvas, Les Bretonnes, arrived in Arles for some changes requested by its purchaser: "Gauguin's canvas, Breton Children, has arrived, and he's altered it very, very well. But although I quite like this canvas, it's all the better that it should be sold, since the two he's going to send you from here are thirty times better. I'm speaking of the women picking grapes and the woman with the pigs. ... [These] two latest canvases which you're going to see are very firm in the impasto, there's even some work with the knife in them. And that will put his Breton canvases into the shade a little." Vincent apparently had some second thoughts about this last statement, as it called into question the value of the many Breton canvases of Gauguin that Theo was then holding. He adds hastily: " ... not all, but some of them."

Context:
BVG 563, 11/23/1888: "Gauguin's canvas, 'Breton Children,' has arrived and he has altered it very well. But though I quite like this canvas, it is all to the good that it is sold, and the two he is about to send you from here are thirty times better."
JLB 721, 11/19/1888: "Gauguin's canvas, Breton Children, has arrived, and he's altered it very, very well. But although I quite like this canvas, it's all the better that it should be sold, since the two he's going to send you from here are thirty times better."

52. "calculations" BVG 563, 11/23/1888. Vincent expands on his "calculations" in another letter only a few days later: "If in a year's time he could have made enough to carry out his plan of going and setting himself up in Martinique, I'd think that his fortune would be made. Only, to my mind he shouldn't risk going back there before he has 5 thousand put aside, according to him he would need 2,000. But then to my mind he wouldn't leave alone but with one other or several others, and would found a lasting studio there." (JLB 722, 11/21/1888.)

Context:
BVG 563, 11/23/1888: "I hope we shall always remain friends with Gauguin and doing business with him, and if he could succeed in founding a studio in the tropics, it would be magnificent. However, it requires more money according to my calculations than it does according to his."
JLB 721, 11/19/1888: "I really hope that we'll always remain friends with Gauguin, and in business with him, and if he succeeds in setting up a tropical studio that would be magnificent. But that will take more money by my calculations than by his."

53. Theo looking after his pictures BVG 571, 1/17/1889.

Context:
JLB 736, 1/17/1889: "I had dared to assure him that if he'd stayed quietly with us, working here in Arles without wasting money, earning it, since you were busying yourself with his paintings, his wife would certainly have written to him and would have approved of his quiet life."

54. Vincent looking after his health BVG 571, 1/17/1889. (See Ch. 36, n. 49.)

Context:
JLB 736, 1/17/1889: "There's still more besides, there's the fact that he was sick and seriously ill, and that it was a question of discovering both the illness and the remedy. Now here his pains had already ceased."

691 55. Surely he owed that duty BVG 571, 1/17/1889.

Context:
JLB 736, 1/17/1889: "Then he's the father of children, then he has his wife and his children in Denmark, and at the same time he wants to go right to the other end of the globe to Martinique. It's horrifying, all the vice versa of incompatible desires and needs which that must cause him. I had dared to assure him that if he'd stayed quietly with us, working here in Arles without wasting money, earning it, since you were busying yourself with his paintings, his wife would certainly have written to him and would have approved of his quiet life."

56. He revealed to Gauguin Druick and Zegers, pp. 221-222: "For Vincent the uncertain future prompted thoughts of the past. At this point, it seems, he began sharing with Gauguin the events of his life and the elements around which he had sought to organize it and shape his identity."  57. "Gauguin is very powerful" BVG 565, 12/23/1888.

Context:
JLB 724, 12/11/1888: "Gauguin is very strong, very creative, but precisely because of that he must have peace. Will he find it elsewhere if he doesn't find it here?"

58. Vincent had always been drawn

Vincent had often tried to capture in his art the sense of communal belonging he felt in crowds: from the shared hope outside a lottery office ("The Poor and Money" [F 970 JH 222]; see Chapter 17), to the shared want of a soup kitchen (Soup Distribution in a Public Soup Kitchen"[F 1020a JH 330]; see Chapter 18), to the shared high-spirits of a dockside dance-hall (Carpenter, Seen from the Back [F 1042 JH 207], A Carpenter with Apron [F 1044 JH 208], Girl Carrying a Loaf of Bread [F 1045 JH 209]; see Chapter 26). In The Hague, he had struggled to master the unique artistic challenges posed by crowds ("My ideal is to work with ever more models, a whole flock of poor folk" [JLB 334, 4/2/1883]), and he used the term "moutonner" to describe the technical problems involved: "As to composition, all possible scenes with figures, be it a market or the arrival of a boat, or a crowd of people at the soup kitchen -- in the waiting room, the hospital, the pawnshop, the groups on the street, talking or strolling, are based on that same principle of the flock of sheep from which the word moutonner certainly derives" (JLB 264, 9/17/1882).

59. Folies Arlésiennes, a huge theater Silverman, p. 476: Silverman reports that, according to local archives, the Folies Arlésiennes seated eighteen hundred people. 60. hosted Christmas pageants Clébert and Richard, p. 33: Clébert and Richards describe the performances of "pastorales" at the Folies Arlésiennes which they define as "little mystery plays written to celebrate Christmas ... in which religious themes (especially those of the Nativity) were enlivened with secular and often burlesque stories." According to Clébert and Richards, pastorales were so popular that they often ran long past the Christmas season, even into the summer. 61. traveling zoos Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, pp. 201-202: Merlhès notes that on December 2, the day after the ball, "the menagerie of the 'agreeable animal tamer Pianet' opened its doors to the public in the boulevard des Lices: 'Main attractions: lions, lionesses, tigers, leopards, panthers, cougars, pumas, polar bears, hyenas, a llama, a guanaco, a zebra, a zebu, snakes, lion cubs, elephants, monkeys.' This collection could be viewed from 10 A.M. and a 'grand show' featuring 'performing royal tigers' was staged every evening. Lions, lionesses, and elephants appear on twelve or so pages of Gauguin's sketchbook." 62. luminous Chinese paper lanterns Clébert and Richard, p. 32. 63. some borrowed directly Druick and Zegers, p. 251. (See Ch. 36, n. 65.) 64. from a Bernard painting Pickvance, pp. 230-231: According to Pickvance: "Compositionally, [The Dance Hall's] flat, decorative patterns are indebted to Japanese prints, but may also have been influenced by Émile Bernard, for example his Breton Women and Children." That is the painting that Gauguin brought to Arles when he came in late October. In the same month that he painted The Dance Hall (F 547 JH 1652) (December 1888), Vincent also made a copy of Bernard's image (Breton Women (after Émile Bernard) [F 1422 JH 1654]). 65. In an homage to the maître Druick and Zegers, pp. 250-251: Druick and Zegers call The Dance Hall (F 547 JH 1652) "an essay in compliance ... This is the ultimate synthetic composition, explicitly and skillfully deferential to Gauguin; the foreground row of Arlésiennes seen from the back forms a decorative frieze of hair and headdresses, recalling Gauguin's deployment of a similar device in the Vision of the Sermon." 66. Vincent also abjured

Pickvance sees pairs of complementaries everywhere in The Dance Hall (F 547 JH 1652): "Van Gogh sought to introduce the three pairs of complementaries: blue and orange in the background crowd, red and green on the balcony (with echoes elsewhere), and yellow and violet in the foreground" (Pickvance, p. 231). This observation is not untrue but, in our opinion, puts the emphasis in the wrong place. The distinction between the color contrasts in this painting, which are subtle and minimized, and the stark contrasts in Vincent's other works at the time, is unmistakable (and significant).

67. an idée of a ball Strangely, Pickvance claims that after December 4, 1888 "there are no paintings done [by Vincent] explicitly from the imagination" (Pickvance, p. 203). Yet there is no doubt that The Dance Hall (F 547 JH 1652) was painted after this date and no chance that he executed it on the spot. Elsewhere, Pickvance himself says about the painting, "Clearly, it is one of the paintings from the imagination he did with Gauguin's encouragement" (ibid., p. 230-231). Perhaps the resolution lies in Pickvance's definition of "explicitly." The best indication that Vincent intended this image as an olive branch to Gauguin -- and left it outside the line of his "real" oeuvre -- is his failure to mention it in his letters to Theo (ibid.). 68. Gauguin proposed a more extended BVG 568, 1/7/1889.

Context:
JLB 732, 1/7/1889: "Ah, how I wish that you'd seen the portrait of [Alfred] Bruyas by Delacroix and the whole museum at Montpellier where Gauguin took me. How people have already worked in the south before us! In truth, it's quite difficult for me to believe that we've gone so far astray as that."

692 69. sixty miles southwest of Arles Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 228. 70. the long train ride Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 228: Merlhès reconstructs the artists' travel schedule: "To get to Montpellier, some sixty-eight kilometres from Arles, the two friends had to take the local train leaving at 04:37 (arriving in Montpellier at 07:09) or, and it seems more likely they made this second choice, the one leaving at 08:58 (arriving at 11:33). Only the train returning at 16:09 (arriving in Arles at 19:20) allowed them to return on the same day. Their visit to the museum is therefore likely to have taken place approximately between 13:00 and 15:30." 71. commissioned from various artists Druick and Zegers, p. 254: According to Druick and Zegers, Bruyas commissioned "thirty-odd portraits of himself ... from the artists he patronized." Summarizing these, Druick and Zegers write: "Some are serious works of art ... [but m]ost are merely competent and some downright mawkish" (ibid.). 72. muted tones of Delacroix BVG 604, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: Vincent does not reveal this aspect of his visit to Montpellier until ten months later, in September 1889.

Context:
JLB 800, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: "What I dream of in my best moments aren't so much dazzling colour effects as the half-tones once again. And certainly the visit to the Montpellier museum contributed to turning my thoughts in that direction. For what touched me there more than the magnificent Courbets, which are marvels, the young ladies of the village, the sleeping spinner -- were the portraits of Bruyas by Delacroix and by [Louis Gustave] Ricard, then the Daniel, Delacroix's odalisques, all in half-tones. For these odalisques are something quite different from those in the Louvre. It's above all purplish. But in these half-tones what choice and what quality!" (Emphasis in original.)

73. a portrait of an old man Old Man with a Cane, W318, Arles, December 1888, oil on jute, 70 x 45 cm., Petit Palais-Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. 74. portraits of Madame Roulin

For Vincent, the painting is Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin (F 503 JH 1646). For Gauguin, it is Madame Roulin (W298). For the sequencing and dating of Vincent's portraits of Madame Roulin.

 75. together again in the front For a reconstruction of the sitting of Madame Roulin for both Vincent and Gauguin simultaneously, see Druick and Zegers, p. 230. 76. they exchange self-portraits The two self-portraits (Vincent's Self-Portrait [F 501 JH 1634] and Gauguin's Self-Portrait Dedicated to Carrière [W384]) were not explicitly for exchange with each other. At Vincent's suggestion, they were both painted for Charles Laval, who had sent his self-portrait to Arles in November. ("You'll also be pleased to know that we have an addition to the collection of artists' portraits. Laval's self-portrait, extremely good." [JLB 719, 11/11/1888 or 11/12/1888.]) But for all emotional and psychological intents and purposes, they were an exchange between Vincent and Gauguin. Vincent undoubtedly wanted both artists to work on the same kind of image and wanted Gauguin to support his commitment to portraiture. But he could not get Gauguin to pose for him and probably feared asking him directly for an exchange. The Laval ruse negotiated all these obstacles. That Gauguin saw the ruse (and understood the real agenda) is apparent from the fact that he never gave his self-portrait to Laval but instead, after the debacle in Arles, re-dedicated it to a different painter, Eugène Carrière. 77. "Please consider my journey" Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 192, c. 12/19/1888-12/20/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, pp. 301-302. 78. Theo had intervened Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 301: A letter from Theo to Gauguin at this time is missing but attested to in a subsequent letter. 79. "I owe a lot to Van Gogh" Paul Gauguin to Émile Schueffenecker, l. 193, c. 12/20/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 305. 80. "who became an alcoholic" Paul Gauguin to Émile Schueffenecker, l. 193, c. 12/20/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 305. 693 81. "I am staying put" Paul Gauguin to Émile Schueffenecker, l. 193, c. 12/20/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 305. 82. "This is how things stand" BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888.

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "That's the stage we're at. Gauguin said to me this morning, when I asked him how he felt: 'that he could feel his old self coming back,' which gave me great pleasure."

83. a new rapprochement BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888: In a stroke of wishful viscosity, Vincent puts Gauguin's trouble entirely in the past.

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "As for me, coming here last winter, tired and almost fainting mentally, I too suffered a little inside before I was able to begin to remake myself."

84. "an excellent friend" BVG 563, 11/23/1888.

Context:
BVG 563, 11/23/1888: "He is a very great artist and a very excellent friend."
JLB 719, 11/11/1888 or 11/12/1888: "He's a really great artist and a really excellent friend."

85. "Up to the last days" BVG 573, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889. (Translation found in Druick and Zegers, p. 250.)

Context:
JLB 741, 1/22/1889: "But prior to the last days I could see only one thing, that he was working with his heart divided between the desire to go to Paris to carry out his plans, and life in Arles."

86. he asked Theo to return canvases BVG 563, 11/23/1888.

Context:
JLB 721, 11/19/1888: "What I say about sending back studies, there's no hurry at all, and I'm referring to the bad ones which, however, will serve me as documents -- or those that are cluttering up your apartment."

87. proposed not sending any more BVG 560, 12/4/1888: Perhaps fearing that an outright refusal to send paintings would trigger alarm bells in Paris, Vincent frames this startling retreat in careful terms.

Context:
JLB 723, 12/1/1888: "I think that -- in spite of myself -- I won't be able to prevent myself sending you a few canvases shortly, say within a month. I say in spite of myself, for I'm convinced that the canvases gain from drying right through here in the south, to the point where the impasto is thoroughly hardened, which takes a long time -- that's to say a year. If I restrain myself from sending them that would certainly be best. For we don't need to show them at the moment, I'm well enough aware of that." (Emphasis in original.)

88. "It would certainly be better" BVG 560, 12/4/1888.

Context:
JLB 723, 12/1/1888: "If I restrain myself from sending them that would certainly be best. For we don't need to show them at the moment, I'm well enough aware of that."

89. "absolute serenity" BVG 565, 12/23/1888.

Context:
BVG 565, 12/23/1888: "I am waiting for him to make a decision with absolute serenity."
JLB 724, 12/11/1888: "I'm waiting with absolute serenity for him to make a decision."

90. a bizarre discourse BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888. In this letter, Vincent uses the phrase "family ... resemblance" to describe the similar looks of Delacroix, Gauguin, and one of Rembrandt's sitters. Earlier in this letter to Theo, he mentions that Bruyas "looks damnably like you or me" although he doesn't explicitly use the phrase, a "family resemblance." (See Ch. 36, n. 92.)

Context:
BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888: "You know the strange and magnificent 'Portrait of a Man,' by Rembrandt, in the Lacaze Gallery. I said to Gauguin that I myself saw in it a certain likeness in family or in race to Delacroix or to Gauguin himself, …"
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "You know the strange and superb portrait of a man by Rembrandt at the La Caze gallery, I told Gauguin that, for me, I saw in it a certain family or racial resemblance to Delacroix, or to him, Gauguin."

91. the bearded, redheaded Bruyas He later claimed to Theo that he had discovered "a new brother" in Bruyas (JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888).

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "I have been to see the portrait of Bruyas by Delacroix at Montpellier, for we must boldly believe that what is, is, and the portrait of Bruyas by Delacroix resembles you and me like a new brother" (emphasis in original).

92. he linked both Gauguin and Theo BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888.

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "You know the strange and superb portrait of a man by Rembrandt at the La Caze gallery, I told Gauguin that, for me, I saw in it a certain family or racial resemblance to Delacroix, or to him, Gauguin. I don't know why, but I always call that portrait 'the traveller' or 'the man coming from far away.' That's an equivalent and parallel idea to what I've already told you, always to look at the portrait of old [Jan] Six. The fine portrait with the glove for your future, and the Rembrandt etching, Six reading by a window in a ray of sunlight, for your past and your present."

93. ended with a vision of himself BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888: Vincent makes this troubling self-identification by association. In the same passage, he tells Theo both that the portrait of Bruyas by Delacroix "looks damnably like you or me" and that the Bruyas portrait "must have some relationship" to Delacroix's [Torquato] Tasso in the Madhouse. Strangely pleased with this connection, Vincent urges his brother to buy a print of the Delacroix image to confirm (and memorialize) this family resemblance: "I'd really ask you to go and see, at that bookshop where they sell lithographs of ancient and modern artists, if you could manage to get the lithograph after Delacroix's 'Tasso in the madhouse' without great expense" (ibid.). A few months earlier, before Gauguin's arrival, the same image had come to Vincent's mind in making his case for the sanctity of portraiture: "I'd like to paint men or women with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol, and which we try to achieve through the radiance itself, through the vibrancy of our colorations. ... this would be more in tune with what Eug. Delacroix was looking for and found in his Tasso in prison and so many other paintings depicting a true man. Ah, the portrait -- the portrait with the model's thoughts, his soul -- it so much seems to me that it must come." (JLB 673, 9/3/1888.)

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "Bruyas was a benefactor to artists, and this is all I'll say to you: in the Delacroix portrait, he's a gentleman with a beard, red hair, who looks damnably like you or me, and who made me think of that poem by [Alfred de] Musset ... everywhere I touched the earth, an unfortunate man dressed in black came to sit beside us, a man who looked at us like a brother. It would have the same effect on you, I'm sure."

94. "difficulties [that] are rather" BVG 565, 12/23/1888.

Context:
BVG 565, 12/23/1888: "As a matter of fact there are bound to be for him as for me further grave difficulties to overcome here. But these difficulties are rather within ourselves than outside."
JLB 724, 12/11/1888: "Indeed, there are bound to be grave difficulties still to overcome here, for him as well as for me. But these difficulties are rather within ourselves than elsewhere."

95. "as exhausted as an electric battery" BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888.

Context:
BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888: "Gauguin and I talked a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt, etc. Our arguments are terribly electric, we come out of them sometimes with our heads as exhausted as an electric battery after it has run down."
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "Gauguin and I talk a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt &c. The discussion is excessively electric. We sometimes emerge from it with tired minds, like an electric battery after it's run down." (Emphasis in original.)

96. "nervous crises" BVG 623a, 1/31/1890: Vincent wrote this more than a year later.

Context:
BVG 623a, 1/31/1890: "I assure you that he and I are still friends, but perhaps you are not unaware that I am ill, and that I have had serious nervous crises and delirium more than once. This was the cause of our parting company, he and I, for I had to go into a lunatic asylum. But, before that, how many times we spoke of you!"
JLB 849, 2/1/1890: "He and I are still friends, I can assure you, but perhaps you're not unaware that I myself am ill, and have more than once had serious nervous crises and delirium. This was why, having had to go into an asylum for the insane, he and I separated. But prior to that, how many times we talked about you together!"

97. "delirium" BVG 623a, 1/31/1890. (See Ch. 36, n. 96.)

Context:
BVG 623a, 1/31/1890: "I assure you that he and I are still friends, but perhaps you are not unaware that I am ill, and that I have had serious nervous crises and delirium more than once. This was the cause of our parting company, he and I, for I had to go into a lunatic asylum. But, before that, how many times we spoke of you!"
JLB 849, 2/1/1890: "He and I are still friends, I can assure you, but perhaps you're not unaware that I myself am ill, and have more than once had serious nervous crises and delirium. This was why, having had to go into an asylum for the insane, he and I separated. But prior to that, how many times we talked about you together!"

98. "a wretch clad in black" BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888. Druick and Zegers point out that Vincent's memory of the poem, Une Nuit de Décembre (One Night in December) is flawed (Druick and Zegers, p. 194). Here is the actual stanza in English translation (Alfred de Musset, quoted in Druick and Zegers, p. 386, n. 104):

              In every land where I would sleep.
              In every land where I would die.
              There sat, nor would he make reply,
              My ill-starred brother, clad in gloom.
              As though arisen from the tomb.

In his 1875 transcription, Vincent substituted "weep" for "die" in the second line; and one phrase he included in 1888 ("everywhere I touched the earth") is not in the original poem. Druick and Zegers use the first variant to suggest that Vincent's later reference to the poem is a comment on Gauguin's painting Human Miseries, which shows a black-clad figure sitting on the ground with her chin resting on her fists (see Chapter 34). But it is far more likely that Vincent recalled the image directly from his earlier flawed recollection, as recorded in the album, not via Gauguin's work.

De Musset is mentioned several times in the letters between 1875 and 1888. (See: JLB 38, 7/15/1875; JLB 39, 7/24/1875; and JLB 383, 9/7/1883 or 9/8/1883.) The first of these already establishes De Musset's connection with Vincent's sense of a separate, secret entity within: "[Charles Augustin] Sainte-Beuve said, 'There is in most men a poet who died young, whom the man survived' and Musset, 'know that in us there is often a sleeping poet, ever young and alive'" (JLB 38, 7/15/1875). In September 1883, Vincent associated De Musset with heedless self-absorption and tardy remorse in his love affair with George Sand. Ennobling his involvement with Sien Hoornick, Vincent cast himself in the place of the "composed, positive, highly industrious" Sand (JLB 383, 9/7/1883 or 9/8/1883). But in 1888, the parallel is much closer between Vincent and De Musset, who, in "a desperate attempt" and "remorse" over a "separation" with Sand, "sunk still deeper into the mire." (ibid.)

Context:
BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888: "Wherever I touched the earth, a wretch clad in black came and sat by us, looking at us like a brother."
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "... everywhere I touched the earth, an unfortunate man dressed in black came to sit beside us, a man who looked at us like a brother."

694 99. My ill-starred brother Alfred de Musset, quoted in Druick and Zegers, p. 194. (See Ch. 36, n. 98.) 100. the Christlike Tasso BVG 531, 9/3/1888. Vincent makes this association in September 1888 when he proposes to make portraits "with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol" and cites as his model Delacroix's Tasso in Prison (JLB 673, 9/3/1888).

Context:
JLB 673, 9/3/1888: "I'd like to paint men or women with that je ne sais quoi of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol, and which we try to achieve through the radiance itself, through the vibrancy of our colorations. … But this would be more in tune with what Eug. Delacroix was looking for and found in his Tasso in prison and so many other paintings depicting a true man. Ah, the portrait -- the portrait with the model's thoughts, his soul -- it so much seems to me that it must come." (Emphasis in original.)

101. "man of God" Druick and Zegers, p. 255. This passage was deleted from BVG 564, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888 in the Bonger English edition, which reads simply "We were in the midst of magic, for as [Eugène] Fromentin well says: Rembrandt is above all else a magician." Druick restores the original: "We have been plunged into the magical because, as Fromentin puts it so well, Rembrandt is above all a magician, and Delacroix a man of God, like God's thunder." JLB also reinstates this passage in JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888, see context.

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "We've been right in the midst of magic, for as Fromentin says so well, Rembrandt is above all a magician and Delacroix a man of God, of God's thunder ..."

102. one depicting the gaunt The painting was Antoine Verdier's Christ with a Crown of Thorns: Alfred Bruyas (1852), pictured in Druick and Zegers, p. 255. 103. "siege" BVG 560, 12/4/1888. Gauguin, of course, is one of the "people who are being talked about" and the promise of "joy in town, grief at home" echoes the redemption through suffering that Vincent long preached under the banner "sorrowful yet always rejoicing" (JLB 723, 12/1/1888).

Context:
BVG 560, 12/4/1888: "If we can stand the siege, victory will come to us one day, in spite of our not being among the people who are talked about. It is rather a case that makes you think of the proverb -- joy in public, sorrow at home."
JLB 723, 12/1/1888: "If we can withstand the siege, a day of victory will come for us, even though we wouldn't be among the people who are being talked about. It's rather a case of thinking of that proverb, joy in town, grief at home."

104. "sorrowful yet always rejoicing" BVG 560, 12/4/1888. (See Ch. 36, n. 103.) Although Vincent did not recite the familiar line "sorrowful yet always rejoicing" in this particular letter, he expressed a similar sentiment with the phrase "joy in public, sorrow at home." The phrase "sorrowful yet always rejoicing" appears in JLB letters 96 (11/3/1876), 103 (2/26/1877), and 137 (12/9/1877).

Context:
BVG 560, 12/4/1888: "If we can stand the siege, victory will come to us one day, in spite of our not being among the people who are talked about. It is rather a case that makes you think of the proverb -- joy in public, sorrow at home."
JLB 723, 12/1/1888: "If we can withstand the siege, a day of victory will come for us, even though we wouldn't be among the people who are being talked about. It's rather a case of thinking of that proverb, joy in town, grief at home."

105. he scribbled on the wall Gauguin, "Still Lifes," p. 121. 106. " Je suis Saint-Esprit" Gauguin, "Still Lifes," p. 121: The full passage that Vincent supposedly wrote on the wall includes two lines that contain a word play:

              Je suis Saint Esprit.
              Je suis sain d'esprit!
              [I am the Holy Spirit. I am sound of mind!]
Gauguin's 1894 account of this wall writing is generally treated with skepticism in the literature. He did, however, note the couplet in his sketchbook from Arles (see Druick and Zegers, p. 233). This does not, by itself, confirm the account, however. The version of events that Gauguin gave Bernard after returning from Arles in late December (a version that Bernard passed along in a letter to the critic Albert Aurier shows Gauguin already mythologizing the ear incident: in particular, putting a career-serving, religio-symbolic spin on the incident specifically designed to appeal to Aurier. Thus the notes in Gauguin's sketchbook may have been his early notes for this myth rather than genuine diary-like entries. As Jansen notes: "Wordplay was more Gauguin's game than Vincent's" (correspondence with authors, March 2011).

107. the story and its strange title The page from Gauguin's sketchbook is reproduced in Druick and Zegers, p. 235. For reservations about the reliability of these notations, see Ch. 36, n. 106. 108. hallucinatory sightings of the horla Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 200: In January 1889, after his breakdown at the end of December when he cut off part of his ear, Vincent reported that during his subsequent hospitalization, he experienced hallucinations in which the horla played a role: "In my brain fever or neurosis or madness, I don't really know how to say or put a name to it, my thoughts have ranged over many seas. I have even dreamed of the Dutch ghost ship and the Horla ..." (Van Gogh, quoted in ibid.) The "Dutch ghost ship" refers to Wagner's opera, Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), another image that, like Guy de Maupassant's "Le horla," Vincent discussed with Gauguin during the latter's stay in Arles.

Context:
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "In my mental or nervous fever or madness, I don't know quite what to say or how to name it, my thoughts sailed over many seas. I even dreamed of the Dutch ghost ship and the Horla ..."

109. "this perfidious sleep" Maupassant, p. 5. 110. or a sleepwalker living Maupassant, p, 10: "In that case I was a somnambulist -- was living, without knowing it, that double, mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us -- whether a strange, unknowable, and invisible being does not, during our moments of mental and physical torpor, animate the inert body, forcing it to a more willing obedience than it yields to ourselves." Merlhès notes the many opportunities Vincent and Gauguin had in Arles to learn about, witness, or even participate in the craze for supernatural phenomena that was sweeping Europe at the time (Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 221). In November 1888, the local periodical L'Homme de Bronze announced: "Madame Reboul, a somnambulist of the first order, has just settled permanently in Arles and will be holding meetings on all associated matters. Moderate prices. She will visit you at home." On November 18, another announcement appeared in the same paper: "This evening, in the Arts Circle Hall, Professor Leopardi and Mlle Celuta will be holding a mass séance of magnetism, hypnotism and suggestion." Finally, on December 16, according to Le Forum Républicain, a "mesmerist" named Scandar gave a performance demonstrating the powers of "magnetism, hypnosis and fascination." 111. "invisible being" Maupassant, p. 20: "I am certain now, certain as I am of the alternation of day and night, that there exists close to me an invisible being who lives on milk and on water, who can touch objects, take them and change their places; who is, consequently, endowed with a material nature, although imperceptible to sense, and who lives as I do, under my roof." Later, the narrator refers to "this invisible being that rules me, this unknowable being, this rover of a supernatural race?" (ibid., p. 24).

This train of fevered speculation leads to another of Vincent's favorite topics: life on other planets. "There was no moon, but the stars darted out their rays in the dark heavens. Who inhabits those worlds? What forms, what living beings, what animals are there yonder? Do those who are thinkers in those distant worlds know more than we do? What can they do more than we? What do they see which we do not? Will not one of them, some day or other, traversing space, appear on our earth to conquer it, just as formerly the Norsemen crossed the sea in order to subjugate nations feebler than themselves? We are so weak, so powerless, so ignorant, so small -- we who live on this particle of mud which revolves in liquid air." (ibid., p. 25.)

112. determined to suck the life out Maupassant, p. 9: "July 4. I am decidedly taken again; for my old nightmares have returned. Last night I felt somebody leaning on me who was sucking my life from between my lips with his mouth. Yes, he was sucking it out of my neck like a leech would have done." 113. plunge a knife into him Maupassant, p. 10: "Picture to yourself a sleeping man who is being murdered, who wakes up with a knife in his chest, a gurgling in his throat, is covered with blood, can no longer breathe, is going to die and does not understand anything at all about it -- there you have it." 114. drinking his water Maupassant, p. 10: "Having recovered my senses, I was thirsty again, so I lighted a candle and went to the table on which my water-bottle was. I lifted it up and tilted it over my glass, but nothing came out. It was empty! It was completely empty! At first I could not understand it at all; then suddenly I was seized by such a terrible feeling that I had to sit down, or rather fall into a chair! Then I sprang up with a bound to look about me; then I sat down again, overcome by astonishment and fear, in front of the transparent crystal bottle! I looked at it with fixed eyes, trying to solve the puzzle, and my hands trembled! Somebody had drunk the water, but who? I? I without any doubt. It could surely only be I?" 115. stealing his reflection Maupassant, p. 32: "I got up so quickly, with my hands extended, that I almost fell. Horror! It was as bright as at midday, but I did not see myself in the glass! It was empty, clear, profound, full of light! But my figure was not reflected in it -- and I, I was opposite to it! I saw the large, clear glass from top to bottom, and I looked at it with unsteady eyes. I did not dare advance; I did not venture to make a movement; feeling certain, nevertheless, that He was there, but that He would escape me again, He whose imperceptible body had absorbed my reflection." 116. "fairies, gnomes, and ghosts" Maupassant, p. 14: "Ever since man has thought, since he has been able to express and write down his thoughts, he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the feeble penetration of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that intellect remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest, and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature." 695 117. "the conception of God" Maupassant, p. 14. (See Ch. 36, n. 116.) Later in the story, Maupassant develops this theme of divine hallucinations further: "August 17. Oh! What a night! what a night! And yet it seems to me that I ought to rejoice. I read until one o'clock in the morning! Herestauss, Doctor of Philosophy and Theogony, wrote the history and the manifestation of all those invisible beings which hover around man, or of whom he dreams. He describes their origin, their domains, their power; but none of them resembles the one which haunts me. One might say that man, ever since he has thought, has had a foreboding and a fear of a new being, stronger than himself, his successor in this world, and that, feeling him near, and not being able to foretell the nature of the unseen one, he has, in his terror, created the whole race of hidden beings, vague phantoms born of fear." (ibid., p. 25.) 118. He sees objects move Maupassant, p. 20: "I was walking at two o'clock among my rose-trees, in the full sunlight -- in the walk bordered by autumn roses which are beginning to fall. As I stopped to look at a Géant de Bataille, which had three splendid blooms, I distinctly saw the stalk of one of the roses bend close to me, as if an invisible hand had bent it, and then break, as if that hand had picked it! Then the flower raised itself, following the curve which a hand would have described in carrying it toward a mouth, and remained suspended in the transparent air, alone and motionless, a terrible red spot, three yards from my eyes." 119. He feels chained Maupassant, p. 23: "August 14. I am lost! Somebody possesses my soul and governs it! Somebody orders all my acts, all my movements, all my thoughts. I am no longer master of myself, nothing except an enslaved and terrified spectator of the things which I do. I wish to go out; I cannot. HE does not wish to; and so I remain, trembling and distracted in the armchair in which he keeps me sitting. I merely wish to get up and to rouse myself, so as to think that I am still master of myself: I cannot! I am riveted to my chair, and my chair adheres to the floor in such a manner that no force of mine can move us. ... Oh! my God! my God! Is there a God? If there be one, deliver me! save me! succor me! Pardon! Pity! Mercy! Save me! Oh! what sufferings! what torture! what horror!" 120. "an enslaved and terrified" Maupassant, p. 23. (See Ch. 36, n. 119.) 121. the same brave pretense Maupassant, p. 21: "I ask myself whether I am mad. As I was walking just now in the sun by the riverside, doubts as to my own sanity arose in me; not vague doubts such as I have had hitherto, but precise and absolute doubts. ... I certainly should think that I was mad, absolutely mad, if I were not conscious that I knew my state, if I could not fathom it and analyze it with the most complete lucidity. I should, in fact, be a reasonable man laboring under a hallucination. Some unknown disturbance must have been excited in my brain, one of those disturbances which physiologists of the present day try to note and to fix precisely, and that disturbance must have caused a profound gulf in my mind and in the order and logic of my ideas." 122. "I ask myself" Maupassant, p. 21. 123. In a furious attack Maupassant, p. 31: Maupassant's narrator comes to the demented conclusion that by killing the Horla, he will be released from his crazed delusions: "What is the matter with me? It is He, the Horla who haunts me, and who makes me think of these foolish things! He is within me, He is becoming my soul; I shall kill him! ... I have seen Him! Yesterday I sat down at my table and pretended to write very assiduously. I knew quite well that He would come prowling round me, quite close to me, so close that I might perhaps be able to touch him, to seize him. And then -- then I should have the strength of desperation; I should have my hands, my knees, my chest, my forehead, my teeth to strangle him, to crush him, to bite him, to tear him to pieces. And I watched for him with all my overexcited nerves." 124. setting fire to the building Maupassant, p. 33: The concluding scene plays out after the narrator has bars placed on the doors and windows of his room. "I got up softly, and I walked to the right and left for some time, so that He [the Horla] might not guess anything; then I took off my boots and put on my slippers carelessly; then I fastened the iron shutters and going back to the door quickly I double-locked it with a padlock, putting the key into my pocket. Suddenly I noticed that He was moving restlessly round me, that in his turn He was frightened and was ordering me to let Him out. I nearly yielded, though I did not quite, but putting my back to the door, I half opened it, just enough to allow me to go out backward, and as I am very tall, my head touched the lintel. I was sure that He had not been able to escape, and I shut Him up quite alone, quite alone. What happiness! I had Him fast. Then I ran downstairs into the drawing-room which was under my bedroom. I took the two lamps and poured all the oil on to the carpet, the furniture, everywhere; then I set fire to it and made my escape, after having carefully double locked the door." According to the narrator's own account, the resulting fire killed others: "By this time the house was nothing but a horrible and magnificent funeral pile, a monstrous pyre which lit up the whole country, a pyre where men were burning, and where He was burning also, He, He, my prisoner, that new Being, the new Master, the Horla!" 125. When that plot fails Maupassant, p. 35: "Suddenly the whole roof fell in between the walls, and a volcano of flames darted up to the sky. Through all the windows which opened on to that furnace, I saw the flames darting, and I reflected that He was there, in that kiln, dead." But, inevitably, the narrator immediately questions his power to destroy a creature that can so easily escape the rules of the physical world: "Dead? Perhaps? His body? Was not his body, which was transparent, indestructible by such means as would kill ours? If He were not dead? Perhaps time alone has power over that Invisible and Redoubtable Being. Why this transparent, unrecognizable body, this body belonging to a spirit, if it also had to fear ills, infirmities, and premature destruction? No -- no -- there is no doubt about it -- He is not dead. Then -- then -- I suppose I must kill MYSELF!" (ibid.) 126. "Our arguments are terribly electric" BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888; emphasis in original. The French word Bonger chooses to use is "terribly" for Vincent's French word "excessivement" (excessively, inordinately) (BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888). JLB, on the other hand, use "excessively" (JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888).

Context:
BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888: "Gauguin and I talked a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt, etc. Our arguments are terribly electric, we come out of them sometimes with our heads as exhausted as an electric battery after it has run down."
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "Gauguin and I talk a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt &c. The discussion is excessively electric. We sometimes emerge from it with tired minds, like an electric battery after it's run down."

127. "until our nerves were strained" BVG 604, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889.

Context:
BVG 604, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: "My urge to do portraits is very strong these days, in fact Gauguin and I talked about this and similar matters until our nerves were strained to the point of stifling all human warmth."
JLB 800, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: "The will that I have to do portraits these days is terribly strong, anyway Gauguin and I used to chat about that and about similar questions in such a way as to stretch our nerves to the extinction of all vital warmth."

128. his host's volcanic eruptions Gauguin, "Avant et après," p. 124. (See Ch. 36, n. 27.) 129. by ignoring them Rewald, p. 245: In his account soon after the ear incident at the end of December 1888 -- an account that Bernard wrote down immediately in a letter to the critic Albert Aurier (quoted in Rewald) -- Gauguin said: "The day before I left [Arles], Vincent ran after me -- it was at night -- and I turned around, for Vincent had been behaving strangely for some time and I was on my guard. He then said to me: 'You are taciturn, but I shall be likewise.'" To us, this echoes Vincent's strange attempt to pretend to be "invisible" during the height of his discord with his father in Etten in late 1881. At that time, his parents had accused him of trying to "sever family ties" by his unwelcome courtship of Kee Vos. Vincent responded angrily with the "silent treatment" as a kind of perverse wish fulfillment -- to show them what his absence would be like. In Etten, as in Arles, it was a desperate, last-ditch effort to express his anger and quiet the demons in his head: "I think that if I didn't give vent to my feelings once in a while the boiler would burst. ... [It] would perhaps drive me mad if I kept it to myself." (JLB 185, 11/18/1881.) In Arles, however, Gauguin's withdrawal and Vincent's consequent "invisibility" had a new and frightening parallel in Vincent's imaginative world. Invisibility was among the hallucinations that afflicted the narrator in Maupassant's "Le horla." 130. charged with tension BVG 605, 9/7/1889-9/8/1889. The following September, Vincent commented on the portrait of him that Gauguin completed around the second week of December 1888: "Have you seen that portrait he did of me painting sunflowers? My face has lit up after all a lot since, but it was indeed me, extremely tired and charged with electricity as I was then" (JLB 801, 9/10/1889; see Chapter 34). 131. Roulin felt an air of dread BVG 583, 4/5/1889. Vincent wrote in April 1889: "[Joseph] Roulin was saying, or rather made it understood, that he didn't at all like the anxiety that has reigned here in Arles this winter, even considered completely outside the share that fell on me" (JLB 754, 4/4/1889).

Context:
BVG 583, 4/5/1889: "Roulin said or rather hinted that he did not at all like the disquiet which has reigned here in Arles this winter, considered even quite apart from what has fallen on me."
JLB 754, 4/4/1889: "Roulin was saying, or rather made it understood, that he didn't at all like the anxiety that has reigned here in Arles this winter, even considered completely outside the share that fell on me."

132. "Horrible fits of anxiety" BVG W11, 4/30/1889.

Context:
BVG W11, 4/30/1889: "I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head."
JLB 764, 4/28/1889-5/2/1889: "I can't precisely describe what the thing I have is like, there are terrible fits of anxiety sometimes -- without any apparent cause -- or then again a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the mind."

133. nights of wandering sleeplessness Gauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 33: Gauguin wrote in his later account: "On several nights I surprised him in the act of getting up and coming over to my bed. To what can I attribute my awakening just at that moment? At all events, it was enough for me to say to him, quite sternly, 'What's the matter with you, Vincent?' for him to go back to bed without a word and fall into a heavy sleep." Generally, Gauguin's later accounts are untrustworthy, and we do not trust this colorful image for anything other than the fact that Vincent was often awake when Gauguin was asleep or attempting to sleep. Insomnia often afflicted Vincent, especially at times of stress, as this certainly was. Since Gauguin's bedroom was accessible only through Vincent's bedroom, Vincent could have wandered the house endlessly without Gauguin knowing it. That Gauguin "surprised [Vincent] in the act of getting up" or verified that Vincent fell "into a heavy sleep" after these episodes is not credible. If these bedside visits did occur, there may be some measure of insight in Sweetman's explanation of them: "[Perhaps] Van Gogh was befuddled with drink and trying to reassure himself that Gauguin was still there" (Sweetman, p. 212). 134. "contradictions" Gauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 124: "Despite all my efforts to disentangle from that disordered brain a logical reasoning behind his critical opinions, I could not explain to myself the complete contradiction between his painting and his opinions. ... What angered him was to be forced to admit that I had great intelligence, although my forehead was too small, a sign of imbecility. In the midst of all this, a great tenderness, or rather, the altruism of the Gospel." 135. "Vincent has been turning" Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, quoted in Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 218. 136. "excessively abrupt and boisterous" Paul Gauguin to Émile Bernard, quoted in Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 218. 137. he cogently made the case BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889. (See Ch. 36, n. 48.)

Context:
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "Now I feel remorse at having perhaps, I who so insisted that you should stay here to await events and gave you so many good reasons for doing so, now I feel remorse at having indeed perhaps prompted your departure -- unless, however, that departure was premeditated beforehand?"

138. plans for a joint exhibition Druick and Zegers, p. 214. Druick and Zegers quote a passage in letter JLB 721, 11/19/1888 that was published in the French edition of the letters but omitted from the English editions: "Gauguin and I frequently discuss the need to exhibit in London and perhaps we will send Tersteeg a letter. If only Tersteeg had an energetic successor -- that day is coming -- he would be able to work with only new paintings." (ibid., p. 388, n. 162.)

Context:
JLB 721, 11/19/1888: "Gauguin and I often talk about the need to hold exhibitions in London, and perhaps we'll send you a letter for Tersteeg to read. The thing is, should Tersteeg have an energetic successor -- that day is approaching -- the latter won't be able to work with anything but new paintings."

139. he angrily accused his guest BVG 573, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: This accusation comes out in January 1889, after Gauguin's flight from Arles. It appears to suggest that Gauguin and his fellows from Pont-Aven, including Bernard, were scheming against the success of Vincent's "Studio of the South" in Arles during Gauguin's stay there. But even before this explicit accusation, Vincent was seized by paranoia about Gauguin's intentions. In early December when Gauguin was invited to exhibit at Les Vingt in Brussels, Vincent immediately suspected -- without, apparently, any rational basis -- that Gauguin intended to move to the Belgian city in order to be closer to his wife and children. (JLB 723, 12/1/1888; see Ch. 36, n. 41).

Context:
JLB 741, 1/22/1889: "But then one often just comes up against distrust on their part, and the fact that they're always plotting among themselves, which always arrives at the result of -- emptiness. I think that at Pont-Aven 5 or 6 of them had already formed a new group, perhaps broken up already." (Emphasis in original.)

140. rubbed out the dedication Pickvance, p. 171. The painting is (Self-Portrait [Dedicated to Paul Gauguin] [F 476 JH 1581]). Pickvance allows only that "at some point, both the name and the signature were partially erased" (ibid.). Kôdera gives the results of a subsequent technical examination of the painting: "the dedication and the signature on the painting had been removed later with a solvent and ... the damage was restored by Gauguin sometime between the end of 1893 and June of 1895" (Kôdera, p. 102). Kôdera favorably cites Jirat-Wasuitynski's hypothesis that "van Gogh himself may have removed the inscription when he felt his crisis and the collapse of their collaboration coming on in December of 1888." Since Gauguin took the painting when he left Arles in late December, the dedication and signature must have been removed by that time, which means that Vincent must have erased it before Gauguin left. Jansen questions whether there is sufficient evidence that Gauguin brought the painting with him from Brittany, where he had received it initially (correspondence with authors, March 2011; see JLB 704, 10/15/1888). For us, the fact that the signature was rubbed out is evidence enough. No one else but Vincent would have had reason to deface the painting in this way. 696 141. less intimate as well Theo admits as much: "I expect to be back from Brussels on Friday or Saturday, and I'll write to you shortly at greater leisure" (JLB 711, 10/23/1888). In December, Vincent admits the same about his letters: "it's more than time that I wrote to you with a rested mind for once" (JLB 723, 12/1/1888). Letter 723, 12/1/1888, may have been written with a calm self-possessed mind, but it still isn't long. One of many signals of the change in their relationship was Theo's failure to promptly read the books that Vincent recommended: even books as central to his artistic project as Alphonse Daudet's Tartarin on the Alps and Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème. At least eight months after Vincent read them, Theo was still apologizing for not having done so: "Recently I've read Tartarin de Tarascon, which I find very fine, and Le Nabab, which I like much less. I'll read the other Tartarin as well. Madame Chrysanthème isn't in the library, but somebody has promised to let me have it to read. I'm curious to know it." (JLB 708, 10/19/1888.) 142. Theo had warmer words Hulsker, "What Theo Really Thought of Vincent," pp. 14- 15: "Both [Isäacson and De Haan] are very clever fellows intellectually so they are interesting company. As De Haan has a weak constitution he nearly always stays at home with the result that some more people come to us and that makes it quite pleasant here." Theo's discussion of these two painters may have disturbed Vincent on a deeper level. In this letter to Wil, he says of them: "De Haan is a great painter who feels strongly attracted by the movement over here and consequently at this moment is much worried, for he realizes the uselessness of part of his previous work, but in spite of that has made some marvellous things since he has been here. His older work shows some likeness to Vincent's work in Nuenen, but it does not show Vincent's fury, instead of which it contains something harmonious and Rembrandtesque, which is not to be despised. Isaacson is much more gushing, which I think is detrimental to his work; he hasn't got a penny, so has a rather difficult time. If he did not have that decent De Haan I don't know how he would be able to manage. He is very busy painting portraits in families, mainly to save money on models."

In his great sensitivity, especially in matters touching his brother and their relationship, Vincent undoubtedly saw the implied parallel between, on the one hand, the "harmonious and Rembrandtesque" De Haan and the "gushing," portrait-loving, impoverished Isäacson; and, on the other hand, the successful Gauguin and the "gushing" Vincent. Under the fraught circumstances in the Yellow House at the time, it is not necessary that Theo intended this parallel for it to have had an adverse impact on Vincent. Of course, this passage is taken from a letter to Wil, not Vincent, and it is only an assumption that Theo wrote something similar to Vincent in one of the letters that has since been lost. Theo did write to Vincent that Isäacson's work was "very good, but a bit dark" -- which would have solidified the parallel with Vincent (JLB 711, 10/23/1888). (Also see Ch. 36, n. 23.)

143. the two young Dutch artists Meijer Isaac de Haan and Joseph Jacob Isaäcson. 144. "pleasant company" Hulsker, "What Theo Really Thought of Vincent," pp. 14-15. (See Ch. 36, n. 142.) As Stolwijk and Thomson point out, Theo had had other "pleasant" visitors at the rue Lepic apartment in the year since Vincent's departure: "The company of the painters Arnold Roning, Christian Mourier-Petersen, Meyer de Haan and Jozef Isäacson, who all stayed at Theo's apartment for shorter or longer periods between March 1888 and March 1889" (Stolwijk and Thomson, p. 47). 145. Theo did not recommend BVG T2, 10/23/1888.

Context:
JLB 711, 10/23/1888: "They intend to stay in Paris for the winter and to leave for the country as soon as the weather's good enough for working outside."

146. Vincent had urged him to do BVG 555, 10/17/1888.

Context:
JLB 707, 10/17/1888: "So write me with details of your new friends' painting soon, and if they're really painters who are trying to make more progress in something that's completely new, boldly recommend the south to them."

147. He seemed genuinely startled BVG T3, 10/27/1888.

Context:
JLB 713, 10/27/1888: "On returning from Brussels I find your telegram and your letter; in reply to the first, which gave me great pleasure. ... I'm very, very pleased that Gauguin is with you, because I was afraid he'd found some obstacle to his coming." Theo had such confidence in his doubts that Gauguin would leave for Arles that he sent a significant payment to Pont-Aven, which arrived after Gauguin had left."

148. he abandoned the long BVG T3, 10/27/1888. In the same letter, Theo is absolutely dismissive of Vincent's wild "calculations" of when and how he will pay Theo back for all the money he has sent Vincent over the years (JLB 607, 5/10/1888): "If you feel the need to do a great deal of work for yourself, good, say so, and I think we'll be able to manage anyway, but I don't understand the calculation of so many paintings at 100 francs, if we want them to be worth 100 francs; they're worth nothing, because this unworthy society is only on the side of those who have no need of it." (JLB 713, 10/27/1888; emphasis in original.) In another letter, Theo drops his usual chastising tone about Vincent's profligate spending and casts it in a newly indulgent, positive light: "you're still in poverty, because you can't stop yourself doing things for others. I'd be very glad to see you more selfish until you're on an even keel." (JLB 711, 10/23/1888.) Given their long history, this permissiveness had to seem artificial and disturbing to Vincent. It is the tone of an indulgent parent talking to an oversensitive or spoiled child -- a complete inversion of the relationship Vincent has always seen himself having with Theo.

Context:
JLB 713, 10/27/1888: "Now, from your letter I can see that you're ill and that you're giving yourself masses of worries. I must tell you something once and for all. To me it's as if the matter of money and sales of paintings and the whole financial side doesn't exist, or rather, that it exists like an illness."

149. only patronizing assurances BVG T3, 10/27/1888. Vincent must have found especially demeaning his brother's characterization of Vincent's concern about not selling (as expressed so plaintively in JLB 712, 10/25/1888; see Chapter 33) as a disease. In this ill-considered conceit, "accidents" is Theo's euphemism for unplanned or excessive expenditures -- which treats them as if they were involuntary spasms rather than willful acts. Never before had Theo excused Vincent so completely from accountability for his financial irresponsibility. The most sympathetic reading is that Theo took Vincent's pathetic mea culpa in (JLB 712, 10/25/1888) as a worrying sign that his brother had reached a breaking point and needed an extraordinary exoneration, which (JLB 713, 10/27/1888) certainly is. But we still think Vincent probably took it as a collapse of Theo's confidence that Vincent would ever create saleable art or achieve self-sufficiency -- in short, a truly devastating vote of no-confidence.

Context:
JLB 713, 10/27/1888: "Now, from your letter I can see that you're ill and that you're giving yourself masses of worries. I must tell you something once and for all. To me it's as if the matter of money and sales of paintings and the whole financial side doesn't exist, or rather, that it exists like an illness. ... we have to treat it like the pox, if we have it. That's to say, take precautions against the accidents that can result from it, but otherwise not worry oneself sick about it. You've been thinking about it too much recently, and even though there's no symptom of an accident, you're suffering as a result. By accidents I mean poverty, and so it's important, in order to avoid it, to tread carefully, not to overdo it, and to avoid other kinds of illness as far as possible."

150. "the condition I want" BVG T3, 10/27/1888.

Context:
JLB 713, 10/27/1888: "What I'd like to see you achieve would be that you never had that concern."

151. empty blandishments The most notable of these blandishments is this famous passage: "You can, if you wish, do something for me; that's to continue as in the past and create for us a circle of artists and friends, something which I'm utterly incapable of doing by myself and which you, however, have more or less created since you've been in France" (JLB 713, 10/27/1888). This cheerful encouragement represents a small seed of truth wrapped in a large fruit of invention. As Theo surely knew, no one was less equipped to create "a circle" than Vincent. Alternately stubborn and tyrannical, ill-socialized and uncooperative, Vincent could not keep even a single friend for very long. (Van Rappard is the sole exception, and even that exceptional friendship eventually ended.) We see in passages like this only an insight into how Theo handled his difficult brother: either by supporting his delusional missions or, as here, by giving him "official" tasks that made him feel a part of Theo's larger enterprise. The same inflationary encouragement filled Theo's reports about Vincent to his mother and other family members, all of it designed to bolster his brother's spirits in the face of continued failure to sell or even show his work and to assuage their ongoing worries about Vincent.

In his desperation to belong and to realize the partnership with Theo that he had long dreamed of, Vincent no doubt took these assignments seriously and did what he could to fulfill them. But we doubt if Theo expected him to succeed (indeed, he would have been surprised if he did) and there is certainly no evidence that he did succeed. Most subsequent claims for Vincent's centrality to the art scene in Paris in the mid-1880s are based on this and similar passages in which Theo dutifully (and lovingly) dresses Vincent's failures in the dignity of high purpose and good intentions. Theo's investment in the Yellow House and the combination with Gauguin represent, to some extent, only the most recent of his efforts to make his brother feel useful, needed, and good about himself, despite the constant evidence of failure. The notion that Theo could not make a circle of friends for himself, as an attractive and sociable young man and a dealer in the art of the "new school" at Goupil, is preposterous on its face as well as contradicted by Theo's success throughout his life -- before, during, and after Vincent's brief stay in Paris -- at doing just that. Vincent's one solo attempt at adding to Theo's entourage -- Gauguin -- ended famously in catastrophe.

152. "you are living like" BVG T3, 10/27/1888. Note how this echoes back Vincent's past rhetoric in defense of his inability to support himself through his art. Theo knows this is how Vincent wants his life to be seen ("living ... in the same way as great men and noblemen") and he knows Vincent craves his respect -- so he is only too happy to protest his admiration if it will help keep Vincent from spiraling deeper into the vortex of guilt and self-reproach opened up in (JLB 712, 10/25/1888). In the same letter, Theo is dismissive of Vincent's elaborate calculations of the path forward to financial self-sufficiency -- "If you feel the need to do a great deal of work for yourself, good, say so, and I think we'll be able to manage anyway, but I don't understand the calculation of so many paintings at 100 francs" -- and he loftily lays the blame not on Vincent's poor draftsmanship or stubborn insistence on artistic prerogatives, but on "this unworthy society" that doesn't prize true art. "But knowing that, let's do likewise and say, we have no need of it." This represents a startling new license (i.e., "It's not your fault, it's the society's fault") -- coming from a salesman who catered to the rich and the bourgeoisie -- to ignore the demands of the marketplace. Vincent could only have seen this sudden volte-face as a posture of pity, not a genuine change of heart.

Context:
BVG T3, 10/27/1888: "You don't know how much pain you give me when you say that you have worked so hard that you feel as though you had not lived. In the first place I don't believe this is true, for in point of fact you are living and living like the great ones of the earth and the aristocrats."
JLB 713, 10/27/1888: "You don't know how you grieve me when you say that you'll have worked so much that you'll feel that you haven't lived. First of all, I believe that isn't true, because you are in fact living, and in the same way as great men and noblemen."

153. "We must see to it" BVG T3, 10/27/1888.

Context:
BVG T3, 10/27/1888: "Seeing that we two together haven't got very much, we must see to it that we don't take too much on our shoulders, but apart from this consideration we shall be able to go on for some time to come, even without selling anything."
JLB 713, 10/27/1888: "Since the two of us don't have much of it, we mustn't overburden ourselves, but taking that into consideration we can hold out for some time yet, even without selling this or that."

154. " grand succès" BVG T3a, 11/13/1888. Note: there is no JLB translation for this letter.

Context:
BVG T3a, 11/13/1888: "It will probably please you to learn that your pictures are having a great success. ... Degas is so enthusiastic about your works that he is speaking about them to a lot of people, and he is going to buy the canvas representing a spring landscape ... Two canvases have now been definitely sold. As there is a combination of exchange, I am quoting that first one for you at 375 francs net, and the other one at 225 francs. I could also sell the ring of Breton girls."

155. reports of more sales BVG T3a, 11/13/1888. Note: there is no JLB translation for this letter. (See Ch. 36, n. 154.)

Context:
BVG T3a, 11/13/1888: "It will probably please you to learn that your pictures are having a great success. ... Degas is so enthusiastic about your works that he is speaking about them to a lot of people, and he is going to buy the canvas representing a spring landscape ... Two canvases have now been definitely sold. As there is a combination of exchange, I am quoting that first one for you at 375 francs net, and the other one at 225 francs. I could also sell the ring of Breton girls."

156. "bigger than anybody" b0916 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh, Willemina van", 12/6/1888: Theo wrote Wil: "You cannot describe what all there is to see in [Gauguin's] paintings, but it seems that he is bigger than anybody had thought. ... Monet [Claude Oscar Monet, 1840-1926; French artist] also creates beautiful images of nature but one must be happy and healthy to be able to enjoy them, or the thought may arise, 'Were I but there, then I would be happy.' ... In [Gauguin] nature itself speaks while in Monet you hear the creator of the paintings speak." In other words, Gauguin's images express the beauty of nature directly, while, in Monet, the hand of the artist intrudes on that beauty. Interestingly, what sounds like a Symbolist comment about "essences" is, in fact, a purely Naturalist appreciation. Either ignorant of or unpersuaded by the new doctrine, Theo continues to see paintings through the prism of his nature-loving upbringing. 157. "strange poetry" b0916 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh, Willemina van", 12/6/1888: In December 1888, Theo wrote his sister Wil, who had visited him in Paris earlier that year: "Do you remember the painting by Gauguin with the negresses that hangs over the sofa? He recently sent me at my business some twenty paintings he made last year in Bretagne. You know, if you can still recall the painting, what a strange poetry it has." Despite the influx of new works from Pont-Aven and Arles, Theo continued to prefer the work from Martinique, especially for its exotic subject matter and "primitive" allure: "Mostly the calm nature that fills his inner self with resignation, but sometimes also the wild upwelling of all his sorrow and struggle, that he expresses through the most powerful deepest tone-colors which resonate especially when he saw nature burst under the beneficent and creative force of the sun." Theo considered the newer work more accessible ("if they are not more beautiful, we can enjoy them right away" [ibid.]), but clearly this is a mixed compliment. His bourgeois, office-bound, nature-loving heart remained with Gauguin's visions of the South Seas. He was a conventional man with dreams of ultimate escape from convention, and Gauguin's Martinique paintings delivered that dream. 158. "Gauguin whispers words" b0916 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh, Willemina van", 12/6/1888. 159. "He could go the same way" b0916 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh, Willemina van", 12/6/1888: "He could go the same way as Millet [Jean-François Millet, 1914-1875; French artist] did earlier, who is now understood by all, because the poetry he created is so powerful that large and small everybody finds satisfaction in it." 160. in stark contrast to Vincent's Pickvance, pp. 202-203: Pickvance counts only two letters from Van Gogh between December 4 and the third week of December. Gauguin wrote four letters to Theo during the same period. 161. courtly gestures Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 288. (See Ch. 36, n. 163.) 162. Gauguin sent multiple shipments Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 183, c. 11/22/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 288. 163. complete with directions Paul Gauguin to Theo van Gogh, l. 183, c. 11/22/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 288: Gauguin sends Theo elaborate instructions on how to handle the coarse jute support he had bought in Arles: "This sacking can be difficult to stretch. The trick is to soak it as much as possible, taking care to soak it all over, and not to bang in the pegs until later when it is dry and slack. It will then fit the frame snugly. But you probably know all this better than I." 164. mocking portrait of Vincent BVG 605, 9/7/1889-9/8/1889: Clearly, Vincent perceived Gauguin's portrait as unflattering, as he admitted the following September (1889). In his much later account, Gauguin recounted that Vincent's negative reaction to the portrait was immediate and fierce: "When the portrait was finished he said to me: 'Yes, that is me, but as a madman'" (Gauguin, quoted in Erpel, p. 47).

Context:
JLB 801, 9/10/1889: "Have you seen that portrait he did of me painting sunflowers? My face has lit up after all a lot since, but it was indeed me, extremely tired and charged with electricity as I was then."

165. "a great work of art" Jansen and Robert, p. 81: Theo wrote this to Jo Bonger, his future wife, in January 1889, only a month after receiving the painting, so it cannot be dismissed as just empty flattery of the artist: "Gauguin painted a portrait of Vincent during the last days he spent with him & gave it to me as a gift. It is a great work of art & the best portrait that's been made of him in terms of capturing his inner being." 166. "best portrait" Jansen and Robert, p. 81. 167. unshared letters Gauguin had a history of correspondence with Theo that neither sender nor recipient was willing to share with Vincent. In October, Vincent wrote complainingly on this score: "[I received a l]etter from Gauguin, who tells me that he's sent you a consignment of paintings and studies. Would be very pleased if you could find the time to write and give me some details of what they are." (JLB 704, 10/15/1888.) A letter in December suggests that Gauguin still had not yielded the confidentiality of his correspondence with Theo: "Gauguin will write to you tomorrow, he's waiting for a reply to his letter and sends his warm regards" (JLB 723, 12/1/1888). 168. intensified the sibling rivalry For a full discussion of the sibling rivalry between Vincent and Gauguin (for Theo's money and favor) that preceded Gauguin's arrival in Arles. 169. "a schemer" BVG 538, 9/17/1888.

Context:
BVG 538, 9/17/1888: "I feel instinctively that Gauguin is a schemer who, seeing himself at the bottom of the social ladder, wants to regain a position by means which will certainly be honest, but at the same time, very politic."
JLB 682, 9/18/1888: "I instinctively feel that Gauguin is a calculating person, who, seeing himself at the bottom of the social ladder, wishes to regain a position by means that will be honest, to be sure, but which will be very shrewd."

170. delusions of betrayal Nagera, pp. 135-136: Nagera identifies the same dynamic of resentment, but couches it in less dramatic terms: "Vincent was affected by the fact that things had begun to change for Gauguin. He had started to have some success. Theo had managed to sell three of his paintings while Vincent's did not sell. Theo had a genuine admiration for Gauguin's art as Vincent did, but the latter could not help reacting with some jealousy, especially when his brother praised Gauguin." On the other hand, Nagera also identifies another, more dramatic source of tension in the Yellow House that is not discussed in the text: "There were many reasons for his increased distress apart from his massive conflicts with his unconscious homosexual strivings in relation to Gauguin. Gauguin was very masculine and virile, and very successful with the Arlésiennes. Vincent was not at all successful with them, furthermore his potency was already failing." (ibid.)  171. Vincent's relations with Bernard Vincent first expressed concern -- already tinged with paranoia -- when Bernard failed to send some studies about a week after Gauguin arrived in Arles: "I was a little surprised not yet to have received the studies that you promised in exchange for mine" (JLB 716, 11/1/1888 or 11/2/1888). In the postscript to this letter, Vincent urges Bernard to write his friend, the Zouave lieutenant Paul Eugéne Milliet. But as of a month later, when Milliet wrote Vincent from Guelma, Algeria, Bernard had not done so. A week later, Vincent writes of Bernard's silence with increasing concern: "I've still not received the exchanges from Pont-Aven" (JLB 718, 11/10/1888). Finally, in mid-November, Vincent receives a single study from Bernard, a seascape, in exchange for the paintings he sent to Pont-Aven. He was clearly expecting more. Worse, the painting apparently came enclosed with Charles Laval's self-portrait and did not contain any letter or note from Bernard (JLB 719, 11/11/1888 or 11/12/1888). Vincent takes his frustration and disappointment out on the painting, acidly telling Theo that he should continue keeping an eye out for a " fine Bernard" (ibid., emphasis added). In fact, Vincent and Bernard will not exchange letters again for almost a year -- mid-November 1889 -- and Vincent's single letter then will be his last to Bernard (JLB 822, 11/26/1889). 697 172. Bernard continued to correspond See Ch. 36, n. 129. For examples of Gauguin's letters to Bernard during his stay in Arles (many not specifically dated), see Gauguin, Letters to His wife and Friends (1946), pp. 112-113, 115-116, Gauguin, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages (1984), pp. 269-270, 274-275, 283-284, and Roskill, pp. 271-273. Vincent later reported suspecting outright scheming between Gauguin and Bernard during this period and before. 173. Gauguin as a lost sibling BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888. (See Ch. 36, n. 92.) Also note how Vincent strives to see himself, Theo, and Gauguin as a single unit. After Theo sells Gauguin's Les Bretonnes, Vincent revives the first-person plural of earlier days with Theo: "One way or another, all three of us, he, you and I, will still be able to pull ourselves together a bit, in order to calmly take in what we've just done" (JLB 715, 10/29/1888; emphasis added). Another aspect of the same dynamic is Vincent's bringing Gauguin into the brothers' epistolary rituals, as in "We shake your hand firmly in thought" (JLB 717, 11/3/1888) and "Gauguin sends his warm regards" (JLB 718, 11/10/1888).

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "On the one hand, I felt that I couldn't do better than push to complete what we started, to urge Gauguin to join us, and on the other hand, as you may know from experience, when you furnish a house or move in, it's the case that it's more difficult than you think."

174. attacks of inexplicable dread Lubin is among several commentators who have suggested that one source of the overwhelming dread Vincent felt leading up to his psychotic attack in December 1888 was homosexual panic: that is, the fear that his emotional reaction to the possibility of Gauguin's leaving Arles originated in an illicit sexual attraction to him (Lubin, pp. 164-166). Lubin writes, "When Gauguin did not reply to his entreaties, Vincent sometimes acted like a frustrated lover who denied what he longed for" (ibid.). Lubin locates this sexual attraction in the mother-child relationship: "Vincent had always been drawn to the sick and the poor, and Gauguin had even more than that to offer him. While Vincent perceived Gauguin as a companion who would keep him out of the mire of isolation, Gauguin would serve a different function than Theo. Theo took care of Vincent, but Vincent would take care of the sick penniless Gauguin. After all, Vincent had nursed poor sick people in the Borinage, and his relation with his mother improved temporarily when he was able to nurse her after she injured her hip. An earlier wish to become a doctor was no doubt related to his interest in nursing the sick and suffering. In all of these situations he took on the role of a loving mother toward a helpless child." (ibid.)

Nagera also identifies the tension in the Yellow House with unexpressed and inexpressible sexual desire: "There were many reasons for his increased distress apart from his massive conflicts with his unconscious homosexual strivings in relation to Gauguin. Gauguin was very masculine and virile, and very successful with the Arlésiennes. Vincent was not at all successful with them, furthermore his potency was already failing." (Nagera, pp. 135-136.) Roskill sees "an unruly homosexual element in the relationship between the two men, which led Gauguin to exaggerate his prowess with women and van Gogh to feel unmanly by comparison" (Roskill, p. 200).

Like many in the nineteenth century, Vincent himself associated mental illness with femininity (see Ch. 26, n. 574). Thus, it would not be surprising if, as his mental state deteriorated and his potency waned, his fevered thoughts began to question his own masculine bona fides. He was a thirty-five-year-old, never-married man with a history of troubled, unrequited, unconsummated, and unsuccessful relationships with women. Such questions already obsessed a society that had been especially obsessed with issues of masculinity (and lack thereof) following the great insult to French masculinity delivered by defeat in the Franco-Prussian War -- an obsession that had since spread to much of the continent. (See Micale, pp. 251-252.)

Nye summarizes the psychosexual climate: "The fear of effeminacy, sexual perversions, and homosexuality was common throughout western Europe in the decades prior to 1914. This widespread public concern was certainly stimulated by growing military tensions, a number of prominent homosexual scandals, and the multiple strains put on sex roles by the social and political emancipation of women." (Nye, p. 125.) This "perfect storm" of personal insecurities, cultural biases, past failures, physical deterioration, and mental affliction, combined with a delusionally exaggerated sense of the catastrophic consequences of Gauguin's departure may have caused Vincent to question his masculinity (i.e., his masculine efficacy) and may even have led him to something that looked and functioned like "homosexual panic." However, based on the totality of his sexual life, we have no doubt that these feelings, if Vincent had them, were in no way located in actual sexual desire.

175. hoarding Theo's letters The first letter that survives because Vincent saved it (not because Vincent sent it back to Theo with annotations and Theo saved it) is JLB 708, 10/19/1888, which is dated on the eve of Gauguin's arrival in Arles. The last one is BVG T41a, 7/22/1890 (note: there is no JLB translation of this letter). Unlike Vincent, Theo dated his letters. 176. eavesdropped suspiciously BVG 557, 10/24/1888: This began as soon as Gauguin arrived, suggesting that the seed of distrust between guest and host had already been planted (see Ch. 36, n. 167). Vincent continues to "want in" on the letters Gauguin sends his brother.

Context:
JLB 712, 10/25/1888: "Soon, when Gauguin writes to you, I'll add another letter to his. Of course, I don't know in advance what Gauguin will say about this part of the world and about our life, but in any case he's very happy with the good sale that you made for him."

177. Christmas trip to Holland BVG 568, 1/7/1889. The trip does not appear in the (sparse) correspondence from December, but when it surfaces in early January, it is clear that it was scheduled previously and postponed, and that Vincent knew about it already. By the time this letter was written, Vincent no doubt knew that the purpose of Theo's trip was to announce his engagement to Jo Bonger. He writes his mother and sister the same day in what could be a sly acknowledgment of an engagement that he is not supposed to know about yet: "Although it's still somewhat in the future, you'll already be thinking about Theo's visit all the same" (JLB 733, 1/7/1889). However, he probably did not know about the proposal until right before Christmas, suggesting that Theo may have hidden the trip's purpose from him prior to that for fear of an adverse reaction -- which is exactly what happened.

Context:
JLB 732, 1/7/1889: "But you've no idea how much I regret that your journey to Holland hasn't already been made."

178. reckoning with a phantom twin It is impossible that Vincent did not see the parallels between the phantom in Dickens's Christmas tale, Maupassant's Le horla, and Musset's "ill-starred brother." Here is the passage in which Dickens introduces Redlaw's Christmas ghost: "Ghastly and cold, colorless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into its terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore. ... This was the dread companion of the haunted man!" (Dickens, pp. 364-365, emphasis in original.) Since Dickens's Christmas books were part of Vincent's holiday ritual, it is possible that Vincent's recounting of the story to Gauguin prompted Gauguin's recollection of the Maupassant story, not the other way around. 179. a book that he reread BVG R30, 3/5/1883. Vincent wrote about this to Van Rappard in 1883. Given his relations with his family, Vincent's re-reading of these stories represents a kind of annual self-mortification -- a punishment he inflicted on himself every Christmas for his continuing estrangement from home and family. The same impulse, we believe, drove him to the Christmastime self-mutilation in 1888. Thus, it is reasonable to deduce that he probably continued to re-read The Haunted Man in the same way after 1883, when his relations with his family only worsened, right up to the fateful Christmas in Arles.

Context:
JLB 325, 3/5/1883: "This week I bought a new 6-penny edition of Christmas carol and Haunted man by Dickens (London Chapman and Hall) with about 7 illustrations by [Frederick] Barnard, for example, a junk shop among others. I find all of Dickens beautiful, but those two tales -- I've re-read them almost every year since I was a boy, and they always seem new to me." (Emphasis in original.)

180. " Sainte Barbe corn" Edwards, pp. 32-33: Edwards describes this Epiphany ritual in early December: "it was the custom to place grains of corn in a dish of water, the soaked grains soon bursting into minute threads. If by Christmas these tiny shoots had grown tall and strong enough, then the New Year would be filled with blessings." 181. older pagan fertility rites Edwards, p. 34: Edwards identifies the "pagan significance" of the Saint Barbe corn ritual ("since it was the symbol of the resurrection of Osiris, the grain god"), and of the elaborate ceremony attached to the gathering and burning of the Yule log (traditionally the branch of a fruit tree, other than a fig, that had died in the past year). The latter involved superstitious procedures like circling the kitchen three times and chanting ancient incantations based on harvest cycles, not Catholic liturgy. 182. meat disappeared from meals Edwards, p. 34: Edwards describes in detail the culinary rituals of the season: "The meal was maigre, without meat. First snails, then fried cod and mullet, usually served with sauce en raito -- eaten on the eve of Christmas just as it was eaten by the Greeks on the eve of winter -- or with the garlic-perfumed mayonnaise called I'Aioli. Then cardoon and blanched celery. Sometimes eels were served en raito. Then followed the traditional les treize desserts, the thirteen sweets, which was an essential feature of the dinner and recalled Christ and his twelve Apostles at the Last Supper. These were usually (though they varied from one region to another) dried grapes, small cakes in oil, almonds, raisins, nougat, fennel-scented milk cakes, apples and pears, crystallized fruits, jam or jelly, a local soft white cheese and a special Christmas cake, served with wine and liqueurs, especially the vin cuit of the region. Finally there was the enormous loaf of bread which could not be eaten until a quarter of it had been given to a beggar." 183. special breads appeared Edwards, p. 34. (See Ch. 36, n. 182.) In addition to the calendal bread described by Edwards, Rollet reports the Christmastime appearance of poumpo, a sugar cake (Rollet, p. 234). 184. desserts multiplied Edwards, p. 34. (See Ch. 36, n. 255.) 185. Decorations of fruit Edwards, p. 34. Given Vincent's history, it is entirely possible that he decorated at least some rooms of the Yellow House in the traditional Christmas garlands of fruit and flowers -- as he had done in many of the houses in which he lived since leaving home. 186. the crèches came out Rollet, pp. 233-234: According to Rollet, "Every family of Provence regarded it as a duty to install a crèche according to its means." 187. These elaborate theatricals BVG 574, 1/28/1889: Vincent's description of a pastorale he saw in late January (see Ch. 36, n. 60) gives a good sense of why these productions were so popular.

Context:
JLB 743, 1/28/1889: "As a matter of fact, work distracts me. And I must have distractions -- yesterday I went to the Folies Arlésiennes, the budding theatre here. ... They were performing -- (it was a Provençal literary society) what they call a Noel or Pastourale, a remnant of Christian theatre of the Middle Ages. It was very studied and it must have cost them some money. Naturally it depicted the birth of Christ, intermingled with the burlesque story of a family of astounded Provençal peasants. Good -- what was amazing, like a Rembrandt etching -- was the old peasant woman, just the sort of woman Mrs. Tanguy (Renée Julienne Tanguy-Briend, 1821-1897; wife of Julien Tanguy) would be, with a head of flint or gun flint, false, treacherous, mad, all that could be seen previously in the play. Now that woman, in the play, brought before the mystic crib -- in her quavering voice began to sing and then her voice changed, changed from witch to angel and from the voice of an angel into the voice of a child and then the answer by another voice, this one firm and warmly vibrant, a woman's voice, behind the scenes. That was amazing, amazing. I tell you, the so-called 'Félibres' had anyway spared themselves neither trouble nor expense." (Emphasis in original.)

188. the parade of shepherds Rollet, p. 234: The procession was called the pastrage and it accompanied the midnight mass on Christmas Eve. 189. leading a spotless lamb Rollet, p. 234. 190. the poorest, homeless wretches Rollet, pp. 231-233. 698 191. yet another illusory plan Druick and Zegers, p. 214. Druick and Zegers quote a passage in letter (JLB 721, 11/19/1888) that was published in the French edition of the letters but omitted from the English editions: "Gauguin and I frequently discuss the need to exhibit in London and perhaps we will send Tersteeg a letter. If only Tersteeg had an energetic successor -- that day is coming -- he would be able to work with only new paintings." (ibid., p. 388; n. 162.) The passage also appears in the new JLB translation: "Gauguin and I often talk about the need to hold exhibitions in London, and perhaps we'll send you a letter for Tersteeg to read. The thing is, should Tersteeg have an energetic successor -- that day is approaching -- the latter won't be able to work with anything but new paintings." (JLB 721, 11/19/1888.) 192. a joint exhibition in London Druick and Zegers, p. 214. 193. since the previous summer See Chapter 33. 194. Vincent had been transfixed See Chapter 3. 195. "the absolute of beauty" Michelet, p. 58. 196. his make-believe children BVG 215, 7/15/1882-7/16/1882.

Context:
JLB 246, 7/15/1882-7/16/1882: "I began this letter yesterday evening and I can now tell you that we, namely the woman and the two children and I, spent the night in the big attic. ... As for me, I don't find the company of the woman and the children odd, but feel precisely as if I'm more in my element and as if things had been like this for much longer."

197. overtaken with emotion BVG 213, 7/6/1882.

Context:
JLB 245, 7/6/1882-7/7/1882: "Then the little living room with a table, some kitchen chairs, a paraffin stove, a big wicker armchair for the woman in the little corner by the window overlooking the yard and meadows familiar to you from the drawing, and next to it a small iron cradle with a green coverlet. I can't look at the last piece of furniture without emotion, for it's a strong and powerful emotion that grips a person when one has sat beside the woman one loves with a child in the cradle near her."

198. he rendered again and again BVG 218, 7/21/1882. Vincent wrote in July 1882: "I'll draw the cradle, I hope, a hundred times apart from the one today. With persistence." (JLB 249, 7/21/1882; emphasis in original.)  199. contemplating a favorite print BVG 126, 11/15/1878. In The Hague, Vincent hung the same image over the cradle of Sien's baby and wrote rhapsodically of "that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the baby in the manger as the old Dutch painters conceived of it, and Millet and Breton -- that light in the darkness -- a brightness in the midst of a dark night. So I've hung the big etching after Rembrandt above it -- those two women beside the cradle, one reading from the Bible by the light of a candle, while the great cast shadows put the whole room in deep chiaroscuro." (JLB 245, 7/6/1882-7/7/1882.)

Context:
JLB 148, 11/13/1878-11/15/1878 or 11/16/1878: "You no doubt know the large, rough etching of the same subject after Rembrandt, being the pendant of the other, Reading the Bible, with those two women and the cradle."

 200. a domestic scene in Paris

Van Heugten, p. 265: Van Heugten summarizes what is known about the sitter for a painting (Woman Sitting by a Cradle [F 369 JH 1206]) and a related drawing (Study for 'Woman Sitting by a Cradle' [F 1244bv JH 1151]) that Vincent made in Paris, both of which depict a woman sitting beside a cradle. Interestingly, apropos of La Berceuse (F 504 JH 1655), Van Heugten notes that "Van Gogh had difficulty with the folded hands in the drawing" (ibid., p. 263). Also, in Woman Sitting by a Cradle (F 369 JH 1206), as in La Berceuse (F 504 JH 1655), "motherhood is more hinted at than directly depicted" (ibid., pp. 265-266).

201. "eyes to grow moist" BVG 324, 9/14/1883. We have altered the translations slightly.

Context:
BVG 324, 9/14/1883: "Theo, when I see a poor woman like that on the heath, with a child on her arm or at her breast, my eyes grow moist. ... it cuts right through me when I see a poor little figure like that, feverish and miserable, and it melts my heart."
JLB 386, 9/14/1883: "Theo, when I see some poor woman on the heath with a child in her arms or at her breast my eyes become moist. ... It goes right through me when I see some poor little creature, feverish and miserable, and that then my heart melts."

202. "a child in a cradle" BVG 534, 9/9/1888: The evidence of his own painting of the bedroom suggests that he never followed through on the plan to paint the bedstead.

Context:
BVG 534, 9/9/1888: "As I have already told you, I am going to paint my own bed; there will be three subjects on it. Perhaps a nude woman, I haven't yet decided, or perhaps a child in a cradle, I don't know, but I shall take my time over it."
JLB 677, 9/9/1888: "So, as I've already told you, I'm going to paint my own bed, there'll be 3 subjects. Perhaps a naked woman, I haven't decided, perhaps a cradle with a child; I don't know, but I'll take my time."

203. five months since Marcelle's birth BVG W5, 7/31/1888.

Context:
JLB 653, 7/31/1888: "I hope I'll also get to paint the baby born today."

204. painted the matronly Augustine See Chapter 34. 205. one of his previous portraits Lister, p. 64: "In developing the initial composition for La berceuse [La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin) (F 508 JH 1671)], also in December, Van Gogh traced part of an earlier painting and later employed tracing to repeat the composition." Lister's is the definitive work on Vincent's tracing of La Berceuse. 206. his own family longings See Chapter 3. In August 1888, Vincent advised Theo: "Lastly, vis- 207. he filled a big canvas

Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle (La Berceuse), F 508 JH 1671, February 1889, oil on canvas, 36.6 x 29.1 in., 93 x 74 cm., Museum of Fine Arts. Boston.

208. "As one whom his Mother" BVG 82a, 9/1/1876-9/15/1876.

Context:
JLB 89, 8/26/1876: "As one whom his Mother comforteth, so will I comfort you, saith the Lord."

209. "the journey of our life"  210. paragon of maternal fecundity Meyers, p. 206: Annie Slade-Jones had six children -- five girls and one boy -- including a one-year-old child (see Chapter 8). Werness points out that "The Roulins were the closest thing to a family that Vincent had in this tragic time" (p. 51). 211. "that eternal poetry of Christmas" BVG 213, 7/6/1882.

Context:
BVG 213, 7/6/1882: "And although it was a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her -- it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it, and Millet and Breton -- a light in the darkness, a brightness in the middle of a dark night."
JLB 245, 7/6/1882-7/7/1882: "And even if it was a hospital where she lay and I sat with her, it's always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the baby in the manger as the old Dutch painters conceived of it, and Millet and Breton -- -- -- that light in the darkness -- a brightness in the midst of a dark night."

699 212. icon of motherhood Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle (La Berceuse), F 508 JH 1671, February 1889, oil on canvas, 36.6 x 29.1 in., 93 x 74 cm., Museum of Fine Arts. Boston. 213. "a lullaby of colors" BVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889.

Context:
BVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: "Whether I really sang a lullaby in colours is something I leave to the critics, particularly to the aforesaid ones."
JLB 740, 1/22/1889: "Whether I've actually sung a lullaby with colour I leave to the critics, particularly to those aforementioned."

214. a deep and somber green BVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889. Vincent describes the color of the figure's bust as "olive green" (JLB 740, 1/22/1889). Elsewhere, he writes that the colors in the picture "ranged [in] reds from pink to orange, which rose into the yellows as far as lemon with light and dark greens" (JLB 741, 1/22/1889). The somberest green in the picture by far is the bodice (ibid.). In another letter around the same time, he appears to refer to the color of the bodice as "olive" (JLB 739, 1/21/1889).

Context: JLB 740, 1/22/1889: "It's a woman dressed in green (bust olive green and the skirt pale Veronese green)."

215. light green against the earth-red BVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889. Vincent referred to the skirt as a "pale Veronese green" (JLB 740, 1/22/1889).

Context:
JLB 740, 1/22/1889: "It's a woman dressed in green (bust olive green and the skirt pale Veronese green)."

216. a graduated scale of contrasts More than anywhere else, Vincent's descriptions of the palette of La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) emphasize dynamic gradations, transitions, and ranges of color, not juxtapositions: "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an Impressionist arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better." (JLB 739, 1/21/1889; emphasis added.) "I have the portrait of Roulin's wife on the go that I was working on before being ill. In it I had ranged the reds from pink to orange, which rose into the yellows as far as lemon with light and dark greens." (JLB 741, 1/22/1889; emphasis added.) 217. "As an impressionist arrangement" BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: Vincent wrote this description about a month later.

Context:
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "As an Impressionist arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better."

218. reworked yellows and pinks BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: Vincent describes the painting as "intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks."

Context:
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an Impressionist arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better."

219. the shining Delacroix nimbus BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889. (See Chapter 32.)

Context:
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens. As an Impressionist arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better."

220. the Rembrandt etching BVG 126, 11/15/1878. (See Ch. 36, n. 199.)

Context:
JLB 148, 11/13/1878-11/15/1878 or 11/16/1878: "There's something Rembrandtesque about it, saw it recently. You no doubt know the large, rough etching of the same subject after Rembrandt, being the pendant of the other, Reading the Bible, with those two women and the cradle."

221. in the Schenkweg studio BVG 213, 7/6/1882: The power of this image is revealed in Vincent's description of it hanging over the cradle of Sien's baby in 1882. 

Context:
JLB 245, 7/6/1882-7/7/1882: "So I've hung the big etching after Rembrandt above it -- those two women beside the cradle, one reading from the Bible by the light of a candle, while the great cast shadows put the whole room in deep chiaroscuro."

222. a Carlo Dolci Gethsemane BVG 126, 11/15/1878.

Context:
JLB 148, 11/13/1878-11/15/1878 or 11/16/1878: "Have you ever seen a painting, or rather a photo of it, by Carlo Dolci, The Garden of Olives? There's something Rembrandtesque about it, saw it recently."

223. his own Starry Night

Vincent does not explicitly compare La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) to his first Starry Night (Starry Night over the Rhône [F 474 JH 1592]), painted in September (see Chapter 33) but a connection runs clearly through his association of both images with the Garden of Gethsemane. In 1878, at the dawn of his artistic career in Brussels, he wrote Theo: "Have you ever seen a painting, or rather a photo of it, by Carlo Dolci, The Garden of Olives? There's something Rembrandtesque about it, saw it recently. You no doubt know the large, rough etching of the same subject after Rembrandt, being the pendant of the other, Reading the Bible, with those two women and the cradle." (JLB 148, 11/13/1878-11/15/1878 or 11/16/1878.) A decade later (June 1889), he writes Theo from the asylum at Saint-Rémy: "At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky" (JLB 782, 6/18/1889). All three images -- the mother and cradle, the starry night, and the olive grove, reflected a religious sentiment translated into secular imagery. In the same letter from 1889, Vincent explains that this connection was on his mind (and part of the conversation) during Gauguin's stay in the Yellow House while La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) was on his easel: "[We] sometimes chatted about and that preoccupied us. It's not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas, no." (ibid.) Both Starry Night over the Rhône (F 474 JH 1592) and La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) reflect this "no" by omitting or eliding explicitly religious imagery: in the former, Vincent depicts only the sky above the dramatic events taking place in the Garden of Gethsemane (omitting the figures of Christ and the angel that had frustrated him on several attempts [see Chapter 32]); in La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671), he portrays only the Virgin mother, not the infant Jesus. Dorn finds a connection between these two paintings in shared roots in Loti novels and suggests that Vincent first thought of La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) with Starry Night over the Rhône (F 474 JH 1592) as pendants before arriving at his ultimate plan in 1889 to flank his icon of motherhood with paintings of sunflowers (Dorn, p. 152; see Chapter 37). But undoubtedly the primary connection, in Vincent's mind, between the two images was that both evoked the ultimate, but unportrayable and unapproachable consolation and comfort of religion.

224. "a light in the darkness" BVG 126, 11/15/1878.

Context:
BVG 126, 11/15/1878: "You know how one of the roots or foundations, not only of the Gospel, but of the whole Bible is, 'Light that rises in the darkness,' from darkness to light" (emphasis in original).
JLB 148, 11/13/1878-11/15/1878 or 11/16/1878: "You surely know that one of the root or fundamental truths, not only of the gospel but of the entire Bible, is 'the light that dawns in the darkness.' From darkness to Light." (Emphasis in original.)

225. Corot's ineffable magic In 1878, Vincent associated Rembrandt's etching "The Bible Reading," which features "those two women and the cradle" (see Ch. 36, n. 199) with "the painting by père Corot of the same subject. I saw it at the exhibition of his work shortly after he died," Vincent recalled, "and it moved me deeply." (JLB 148, 11/13/1878-11/15/1878 or 11/16/1878.) Corot died in Paris on February 22, 1875, about two months before Vincent arrived in the city as an employee of Goupil, aged twenty-one. This also suggests the maternal tableau's deep roots in Vincent's imagination. 226. among the most sacred icons

BVG 605, 9/7/1889-9/8/1889. Many months later, looking back on La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671), Vincent laments the interruption of his attack and regrets that he did not do more images like it precisely because it so completely embodied his notion of everyday people as secular saints.

Context:
JLB 801, 9/10/1889: "Had I had the strength to continue, I'd have done portraits of saints and of holy women from life, and who would have appeared to be from another century and they would be citizens of the present day, and yet would have had something in common with very primitive Christians."

227. " entreprises sans issue" Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography, pp. 316-317. 228. reaching out directly BVG 572a, 1/22/1889.

Context:
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "And I believe that if one placed this canvas just as it is in a boat, even one of Icelandic fishermen, there would be some who would feel the lullaby in it."

229. "a chromolithograph" BVG 574, 1/28/1889.

Context:
BVG 574, 1/28/1889: "Now, it may be said that it is like a chromolithograph from a cheap shop."
JLB 743, 1/28/1889: "Now it looks, you could say, like a chromolithograph from a penny bazaar."

700 230. Hadn't Tolstoy called for a return Sund, pp. 221-222: See Sund's discussion of Vincent's second-hand knowledge of Tolstoy's ideas about religion.
231. "primitive Christians" BVG 605, 9/7/1889-9/8/1889. The final phrase is often translated "very primitive Christians," (including in JLB), which better reflects Vincent's argument that early Christians (like all primitive peoples) lived in closer contact with the essences of life than modern-day, church-bound Christians.

Context:
BVG 605, 9/7/1889-9/8/1889: "… if I had had the strength to continue, then I should have done portraits of saints and holy women from life which would have seemed to belong to another age, and they would have been drawn from the bourgeoisie of today and yet would have had something in common with the very earliest Christians."
JLB 801, 9/10/1889: "Had I had the strength to continue, I'd have done portraits of saints and of holy women from life, and who would have appeared to be from another century and they would be citizens of the present day, and yet would have had something in common with very primitive Christians."

232. Tolstoy had nominated his nursemaid Sund, pp. 221-222. 233. "a memorable exemplar" Sund, pp. 221-222. 234. crude form and almanac color BVG 604, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889. This is Vincent's characterization, and it relates his choice of palette in La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) directly to his own mother. In September 1889, Vincent writes this imagining painting a picture for his mother's birthday. Elsewhere, he refers to the colors of La Berceuse as "garish": "discordant sharps of garish pink, garish orange, garish green ... toned down by flats of reds and greens"(JLB 743, 1/28/1889). This description apparently is designed to enlist symbolist musical notions (sharps and flats) as well, although he uses them in a way that is musically nonsensical.

Context:
JLB 800, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: "I really want to redo the reaper one more time for Mother, if not I'll make her another painting for her birthday, that will come later, for I'll send it with the rest. For I'm sure that Mother would understand it -- for it's indeed as simple as one of those coarse wood engravings that one finds in country almanacs."

235. Vincent read that fall Vincent read it in late October and early November, while Gauguin was staying at the Yellow House: "We've done a great deal of work these past few days, and in the meantime I've read Zola's Le rêve, so I've hardly had time to write" (JLB 716, 11/1/1888 or 11/2/1888). Interestingly, other than this report, Vincent says nothing about the book -- which is more symbolist than naturalist in spirit, and therefore unlike the other installments of the Rougon-Macquart series -- until the following summer (June 1889), after moving to the insane asylum at Saint-Rémy (JLB 777, 5/31/1889-6/6/1889). His comments, like his long silence, suggest he did not like the book very much. 236. medieval craftsmen seeking the sublime Silverman, p. 475. 237. the title La berceuse BVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889.

Context:
JLB 740, 1/22/1889: "At present I have a portrait of a woman on the go, or rather on the easel. Which I've called 'la berceuse', or as we say in Dutch with [Frederik Willem] Van Eeden (you know, who wrote that book I got you to read) -- or would simply call in Van Eeden's Dutch 'our lullaby,' or the woman by the cradle."

238. "painted in the most naïve" Loti, p. 4: "This patron of the sailors was painted in a most naïve style and was somewhat ancient, but earthenware figures are wont to outlast human beings; besides, her blue and red robes contrasted cheerfully with the otherwise dull grays of this wretched dwelling. She had listened to more than one anguished prayer in an hour of distress, and in gratitude her worshippers had nailed at her feet two bouquets of artificial flowers along with a rosary." In Loti's tale, the boat was named Marie, after its patron saint, whom they called "Marie, Star-of-the-Sea" (ibid., pp. 17-18). 239. "If one were to put this" BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889.

Context:
BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: "And I'm sure that if one were to put this canvas just as it is in a fishing boat, even one from Iceland, there would be some among the fishermen who would feel they were there, inside the cradle."
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "And I believe that if one placed this canvas just as it is in a boat, even one of Icelandic fishermen, there would be some who would feel the lullaby in it."

240. "affinity" BVG 558b, 10/28/1888.

Context:
BVG 558b, 10/28/1888: "He has, if one must compare him with anything, an affinity with that Pêcheur d'Islande by Loti. I think this will make the same impression on you as on me."
JLB 714, 10/27/1888 or 10/28/1888: "He has -- if he's to be compared with something -- links with those Iceland fishermen of Loti's. I believe that it'll make the same impression on you as on me."

241. a moment of solidaritySee Ch. 36, n. 23. 242. "He and I were talking" BVG 574, 1/28/1889.

Context:
BVG 574, 1/28/1889: "I have just said to Gauguin about this picture that when he and I were talking about the fishermen of Iceland and of their mournful isolation, exposed to all dangers, alone on the sad sea -- I have just said to Gauguin that following those intimate talks of ours the idea came to me to paint a picture in such a way that sailors, who are at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of their Icelandic fishing boat, would feel the old sense of being rocked come over them and remember their own lullabies."
JLB 743, 1/28/1889: "On the subject of that canvas, I've just said to Gauguin that as he and I talked about the Icelandic fishermen and their melancholy isolation, exposed to all the dangers, alone on the sad sea, I've just said to Gauguin about it that, following these intimate conversations, the idea came to me to paint such a picture that sailors, at once children and martyrs, seeing it in the cabin of a boat of Icelandic fishermen, would experience a feeling of being rocked, reminding them of their own lullabies."

243. Gauguin's heavy outlines Silverman, pp. 323-324. Elsewhere, Silverman asserts, "Van Gogh's use of black outlines and the filling of single colors within them have rightly been attributed to the impact of Gauguin, and La Berceuse announces in these ways the most extensive emulation of Gauguin's style" (ibid., p. 322). 244. flat texture Silverman, pp. 321-322: According to Silverman: "The figure [in La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671)] is outlined in black, most noticeably in the areas around the head, shoulders, and bodice, which gives it a partially flattened, cut-out quality." 245. careful gradations of colorBVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889. (See Ch. 36, n. 216.)

Context:
JLB 740, 1/22/1889: "It's a woman dressed in green (bust olive green and the skirt pale Veronese green). Her hair is entirely orange and in plaits. The complexion worked up in chrome yellow, with a few broken tones, of course, in order to model. The hands that hold the cradle cord ditto ditto. The background is vermilion at the bottom (simply representing a tiled floor or brick floor). The wall is covered with wallpaper, obviously calculated by me in connection with the rest of the colours. This wallpaper is blue-green with pink dahlias and dotted with orange and with ultramarine."

246. He borrowed elementsDruick and Zegers, p. 229: Druick and Zegers point out that Vincent adopted the costume that in La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) Madame Roulin is wearing -- the "high, rounded collar with the hint of a white undergarment" shown in Gauguin's earlier portrait. 247. Gauguin's unbroken vermilionSilverman, pp. 321-322: "The bright red flooring is coated with color and shows a relatively unbroken surface, devoid, for example, of the gridding that might define a tile floor." Elsewhere, in describing Gauguin's The Vision after the Sermon, Silverman refers to "Gauguin's use of a dazzling expanse of unreal red -- 'pure vermilion' -- to render the heavenly ground permeating the picture plane as it fills the consciousness of the praying women. The radiant red field spreads in a broad, smooth mass of largely unmodulated color, thinly and evenly applied with a fluid brush that rarely broke the canvas surface." (ibid., p. 106.) Silverman suggests that Gauguin may have had in mind Épinal prints, just as Vincent later claims cheap "chromolithographs" as a model for his La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) (ibid.). (See Ch. 36, n. 229.) 701 248. to prevent any hint of impasto

Silverman, pp. 321-322: Despite a few "hatched brushmarks" in the area of the floor, the painting is notably devoid of Vincent's vigorous impasto or anything approaching an en lever passage. In places, such as the gridding of the tile floor, Vincent seems to have purposefully avoided opportunities for any such displays of paint. Silverman makes an elaborate argument for modeled brushwork around the face and hair: "the plaited crown of hair and the face and neck of the figure protrude off the canvas in thick, dense, glossy paint layers. The face and hair bristle with texture and tangibility ... Van Gogh applies orange, yellow, and red strokes to mold the hair in active, directions packing that loads the surface in a raised, brittle, and resinous glow." (ibid., pp. 322-323.) But we see only Vincent working and reworking the image in those areas that always gave him the most technical trouble -- face and hands. This kind of paint build-up had dogged his portraits since The Potato Eaters (F 78 JH 734) and does not, to us, represent a conscious striving for an impastoed effect, but rather an artifact of indecision and dissatisfaction. Indeed, it was trouble with the hands that caused the painting to remain unfinished at the time of his breakdown on December 23 (JLB 739, 1/21/1889).

249. flowered wallpaper

Although wallpaper had a long history in Vincent's imaginative world (see Ch. 36, n. 252), the literature generally attributes the sudden appearance of the florid wallpaper in La Berceuse (F 508 JH 1671) to Gauguin's ornamental Cloisonnism: in particular, to the background of the self-portrait that Gauguin sent Vincent in anticipation of his arrival in Arles (Self-Portrait Dedicated to Vincent van Gogh [Les Misérables] [see Chapter 34]). Gauguin had written to Vincent on the very subject of the wallpaper in that painting: "The delicate maidenly background with its childlike flowers is there to signify our artistic virginity" (Gauguin, quoted in Werness, p. 50). Werness concludes that "Van Gogh's Berceuse, among all its other complexities, pays tribute to Gauguin's ideas."

Druick and Zegers not only see an indebtedness to Gauguin in Vincent's wallpaper, but also infers from Vincent's invocation of Van Eeden's De Kleine Johannes (JLB 740, 1/22/1889) that the Berceuse's floral wallpaper was inspired by that book's description of Johannes's childhood bedroom, which was "adorned with wallpaper featuring a pattern of 'huge ... flowers in gaudy colors'" (Druick and Zegers, p. 257). If this is true, it would support the text's argument that Vincent's wallpaper evoked the memory of his own childhood bedroom as well -- a memory that the Van Eeden book no doubt reinforced. Werness, Druick and Zegers, and others see formal precedent for Vincent's wallpaper in distant recollections of Flemish Renaissance images that commonly placed floral tapestries behind depictions of the Madonna and Child (see Werness, p. 50, and Druick and Zegers, p. 271). Werness writes, "Vincent had doubtless seen such enthroned Madonnas in museums -- there were more than half a dozen in the London National Gallery alone -- or in books such as, perhaps, an illustrated edition of The Masters of Past Time" (Werness, p. 50).

Werness somewhat dilutes this argument by pointing out that wallpaper was common in Provençal households at the time and therefore it is possible "that there may be a distinctly Provençal source for this design, namely the brilliantly colored wood-block patterns that have recently regained popularity with inferior decorators" (ibid., p. 51). Vincent himself reports that floral wallpaper was common in Arles: "Here in the south we have bare walls, white or yellow, or decorated with wallpaper with big coloured flowers" (JLB 812, 10/21/1889). Silverman goes even further by asserting that "Provençal wallpaper most likely covered some areas of the Roulin home," and that in his painting Vincent has only "taken liberties with his handling" of that wallpaper (Silverman, p. 323).

Finally, Pereira sees in the appearance of wallpaper a symptom of Vincent's impending psychotic episode: "Such vivid backgrounds are seen in the productions of manic and epileptic patients. And the elevation of the horizon is, according to Rennert, a characteristic of disturbed schizophrenics." (Pereira, p. 165.)

250. Sprays of pink dahlias BVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889: Vincent describes the painting in January 1889.

Context:
JLB 740, 1/22/1889: "The wall is covered with wallpaper, obviously calculated by me in connection with the rest of the colours. This wallpaper is blue-green with pink dahlias and dotted with orange and with ultramarine."

251. the dreamed scene of his mother BVG 562, 11/16/1888.

Context:
JLB 719 11/11/1888 or 11/12/1888: "A reminiscence of our garden at Etten with cabbages, cypresses, dahlias and figures. Then a Woman reading a novel in a library like the Lecture Française. A completely green woman."

252. his attic room in Zundert BVG 11, 9/13/1873. Missing his brother in London in 1873, Vincent recalls the wallpaper in the room they shared as children. (See Chapter 3.) Kools reports that in the Zundert parsonage "all rooms had wallpaper and pinewood floors. There were floor tiles in the hallway." (Kools, p. 16.) Jansen questions the childhood resonance of this wallpaper because "the same pattern can be found in the background of the portraits of Dr. Rey and of the postman [Roulin] which seems to indicate that he copied or derived the pattern from a wall that actually existed." (Correspondence with authors, March 2011). We do not believe this is inconsistent with our view (based on pining recollections like this one), that the wallpaper had special nostalgic significance.

Context:
JLB 13, 9/13/1873: "Oh, how I'd like to have you here, old chap, to see my new lodgings, which you'll have heard about. I now have a room, as I've long been wishing, without sloping beams and without blue wallpaper with a green border."

253. speckled with orange and ultramarine

BVG 571a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889.

Context:
JLB 740, 1/22/1889: "This wallpaper is blue-green with pink dahlias and dotted with orange and with ultramarine."

254. tribute to Cloisonnist ornament
 255. the magical mother-child bond Michelet called this "the most profound and sweetest mystery of life" (Michelet, p. 58). 256. hands remained unfinished BVG 572a, 1/22/1889-1/23/1889.

Context:
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "Today I made a fresh start on the canvas I had painted of Mrs. Roulin, the one which had remained in a vague state as regards the hands because of my accident."

257. suffer the same fate Druick and Zegers suggest persuasively that shipwrecks were a subject of some discussion in the Yellow House quite independent of Loti's fictional Pêcheur (Druick and Zegers, p. 227). A season of severe storms in 1888 resulted in a number of catastrophes at sea in which hundreds of fishermen died. These tragedies were reported in newspapers throughout France. According to Druick and Zegers, L'Intransigeant, a newspaper that both Vincent and Gauguin read, featured articles covering these events on April 28, June 2, June 9, September 21, and October 23, 1888 (ibid., p. 388; n. 194). Thus, the metaphor of shipwrecks "took on tragic currency at the moment of Gauguin's arrival" (ibid., p. 227). 258. Bad weather had trapped them Pickvance, pp. 203-204.  259. "madness" Gauguin, "Still Lifes," p. 121: In a later account, Gauguin appears to suggest that he concluded Vincent was mad not long after arriving in Arles, based on Vincent's stories of his past, particularly in the Borinage: "Contrary to the teachings of his instructors, the wise Dutchmen, Vincent believed in Jesus who loved the poor; his soul, entirely suffused with charity, desired by means of consoling words and self-sacrifice to help the weak, to combat the great. Decidedly, decidedly, Vincent was already mad." We would discount some of this as retrospective posturing. However, when Vincent gave Bernard his account in December 1888, only days after leaving Arles, it is clear that, by then, Gauguin truly did believe that Vincent was insane. What else would account for the distraught opening of Bernard's letter to Aurier (dated January 1, 1889) in which he recounted Gauguin's story: "I am so sad that I need somebody who will listen to me and who can understand me. My best friend, my dear friend Vincent is mad. Since I have found out, I am almost mad myself." (Gauguin, quoted in Rewald, p. 245.) Merlhès reports that Gauguin confided a similar contemporaneous report of Vincent's madness to Albert Dauprat, complaining that he had "had to endure, over a period of a month, a whole range of fears concerning a fatal and tragic attack of illness" (Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 218). We take "illness" here to refer to mental illness. 260. "a fatal and tragic attack" Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 218: Merlhès reports that "From the end of December, Gauguin would relate to Bernard that Vincent had "for some time" been turning "very strange" but was fighting it. In January, not perhaps without some exaggeration, he would confide in Albert Dauprat that he had "had to endure, over a period of a month, a whole range of fears concerning a fatal and tragic attack of illness." We consider these contemporaneous reports far more reliable than Gauguin's later account of the events of December 1888 in his book Avant et après. 261. "I have been living" Bernard, n.p.: This was part of Gauguin's report to Bernard, as recorded by Bernard, as soon as Gauguin returned to Paris after Christmas: "Since I had been due to leave Arles he had been so odd that I had been living on my nerves." Because of the proximity of the account to the events, we have changed the tense and translated the French more idiomatically. 702 262. all escapes he had sought Pickvance, pp. 203-204. (See Ch. 36, n. 11.) 263. Jack the Ripper-style killer Druick and Zegers, p. 257: According to Druick and Zegers, at least, the subject of the famous "Prado Affair," the unsolved slasher murder of a prostitute in 1886 which was finally brought to trial in November 1888, played a central role in Vincent's and Gauguin's interaction during their time together in the Yellow House (see ibid., pp. 257-260). Vincent even had a connection to Prado through an art runner named Henri Pranzini (1856-1887), a former boyfriend of Agostina Segatori, who had been convicted of murder and executed in 1887. Druick suspects that Vincent felt an even deeper connection to Prado through press reports that, while imprisoned awaiting execution in 1888, he was reading Victor Hugo's Le dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), an anticapital-punishment tale that had been very important to Vincent in his long battle with his parents (see Chapter 12). It should also be noted that "Jack the Ripper" began his killing spree among London prostitutes in August 1888 and killed his last "canonical" victim in November 1888. The relationship between the Ripper and Prado was not lost on the French press, which means Vincent and Gauguin probably followed the gruesome events in London more closely than they otherwise might have. 264. horla-like nightmares Druick and Zegers, p. 260. 265. he heard familiar footsteps Gauguin, in Stein, ed., pp. 126-127: In his later account, Gauguin added this detail: "I had already almost crossed the Place Victor Hugo, when I heard behind me a familiar short footstep, rapid and irregular." This is the same telling in which Gauguin famously added an assault on his life: "I turned just at the moment when Vincent rushed towards me, an open razor in his hand. My look at that moment must have been powerful indeed, for he stopped, and lowering his head, took off running in the direction of the house." The literature generally -- and rightly, we believe -- dismisses this melodramatic flourish as pure invention. It perfectly fits with Gauguin's general attempt in his later account to defend himself against accusations that he should have done more to prevent Vincent's subsequent self-mutilation. By portraying himself as the first intended victim -- and portraying Vincent as determinedly, dangerously mad -- he justifies his decision to abandon the Yellow House and leave Arles precipitously (i.e., without doing more to calm or appease Vincent). That this exculpation was the driving agenda of this retelling is evident in the very next passage after the one quoted above: "Was I lax at that moment, and oughtn't I to have disarmed him and sought to calm him down? Often I have questioned my conscience, but I do not reproach myself at all. Let him who will cast the stone at me." (ibid.) 266. "Vincent ran after me" Bernard, n.p.: The exchange in the text is based on the account that Gauguin gave Bernard only a few days after the events of December 23 and which Bernard then wrote down in a letter to the critic Albert Aurier dated January 1, 1889: "Finally his departure for Arles, Gauguin hurriedly returning four days ago and the news of Vincent in the hospital. I ran to see Gauguin who told me this: 'The day before I left (for he was due to leave Arles), Vincent ran after me (he was going out, it was night-time), I turned round, for he had been very funny for a while, but I didn't trust it. Then he said, 'You are silent, but I shall be too.' Since I had been due to leave Arles he had been so odd that I had been living on my nerves, he had even said to me, 'You are going to leave,' and as I had said 'Yes' he tore this sentence from a newspaper and put it in my hand: 'The murderer has fled.''" 267. torn from the day's newspaper Druick and Zegers, p. 260: The short item under the heading "Faits diverses" appeared in the Sunday, December 23rd issue of L'lntransigeant. (See ibid., for reproduction.) 268. pointed to the last line

Bernard, n.p.: The text departs from the contemporaneous account that Gauguin gave Bernard and Bernard put in a letter to Aurier (see Ch. 36, n. 266). In that version, instead of handing Gauguin the article, Vincent "tore this sentence from a newspaper and put it in my hand: 'The murderer has fled'" (see Ch. 36, n. 269). This strikes us as a poetic expression, not to be taken literally. Tearing a single sentence (not a headline) from a one-column-inch paragraph would have been a tedious and unnecessary procedure -- hardly the dramatic gesture Vincent apparently intended. We think it far more likely that Vincent handed Gauguin the article, or even the whole page, and pointed out the resonant line of text.

269. " Le meurtrier a pris"

Druick and Zegers, p. 260. The veracity of this part of the story is supported both by the original source (Bernard's account of Gauguin's story immediately afterward [see Ch. 36, n. 266]), and the contemporaneous note in Gauguin's sketchbook in which one of the "notes" from his conversations with Vincent is this: "Le meurtrier en fuite" (the murderer in flight). It may lend the story additional credibility that it does not appear in Gauguin's later account in Avant et après -- undoubtedly because it raises the issue of Gauguin's culpability for not doing more to prevent Vincent's violent actions that night, an accusation that Gauguin's re-telling takes pains to rebut. (See also Ch. 36, n. 368.)

270. Less than three years later BVG 449, 2/3/1886. Vincent wrote Theo in early February 1886: "It's total debilitation" (JLB 558, 2/4/1886; emphasis in original).

Context:
JLB 558, 2/4/1886: "What the doctor tells me is that I absolutely must live better, and that I have to take more care of myself with my work until I'm stronger. It's total debilitation." (Emphasis in original.)

271. "absolute breakdown" BVG 328, 9/26/1883. (See Chapter 26.)

Context:
BVG 449, 2/3/1886: "What the doctor tells me is that I absolutely must take better care of myself and until I feel stronger I must take more rest. It is an absolute breakdown." (Emphasis in original.)
JLB 558, 2/4/1886: "What the doctor tells me is that I absolutely must live better, and that I have to take more care of myself with my work until I'm stronger. It's total debilitation." (Emphasis in original.)

272. "attack" BVG 604, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: In September 1889, Vincent worried about a repeat of the events of December 1888 the following Christmas.

Context:
BVG 604, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: "I shall continue to work without let-up, and then if I have another attack around Christmas, we'll see."
JLB 800, 9/5/1889-9/6/1889: "I'll carry on working very hard, and then if the crisis returns towards Christmas we'll see."

273. professed to remember nothingDoiteau and Leroy, pp. 180-181. (See Ch. 36, n. 275) 274. "mental fevers" BVG 572a, 1/22/1889: We have altered the translation slightly.

Context:
BVG 572a, 1/22/1889: In my mental or nervous fever, or madness -- I am not too sure how to put it or what to call it -- my thoughts sailed over many seas.
JLB 739, 1/21/1889: "In my mental or nervous fever or madness, I don't know quite what to say or how to name it, my thoughts sailed over many seas."

275. terrible hallucinations Doiteau and Leroy, pp. 176-177: Doiteau and Leyroy quote the hospital records from Vincent's stay in the asylum at Saint-Rémy the following year: "This patient has come from the hospital in Arles where he was admitted after an attack of acute mania which had come on suddenly, accompanied by visual and auditory hallucinations which terrified him. During this attack he cut off his left ear, but he has only the vaguest memory of this and cannot give an account of himself." 276. It had been raining Pickvance, pp. 203-204: "From 19 to 23 December it rained day and night. Ten times the average rainfall fell that month most of it from 19 to 24 December and again from 28 to 31 December. The already fragile relationship between the two men must surely have worsened in the enforced confinement of the Yellow House. A contributory factor in the collapse of van Gogh's dream of a studio in the South could well have been this incessant rain." 277. Vincent had been drinking Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 208: The clearest indication that Vincent was drinking even more than usual by this time is Gauguin's report to Schuffenecker only days before the explosion on December 23 in which he compares Vincent's sad state to that of "Edgar Poe [Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849; American writer] who became an alcoholic as a result of his sorrows and neurotic state." (Paul Gauguin to Émile Schuffenecker, l. 183, c. 12/20/1888, in Merlhès, Correspondence de Paul Gauguin: Documents, témoignages, p. 305.) 278. not just wine and cognac Doiteau and Leroy, pp. 171-172: "He would console himself by going to have a 'champoreau,' a coffee laced with cognac, at the neighbouring café, and that is all he would have by way of lunch." 279. more potent absinthe Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 208: According to Merlhès, the strength of absinthe varied greatly, but the range was quite high: between 40 and 75 proof. Although usually diluted in water, the concoction also included sugar, which made it dangerously easy to drink quickly and in quantity. It was also cheaper than other spirits and therefore more widespread, especially in the South. Doiteau and Leroy assert that Gauguin pushed Vincent to drink: "[Gauguin] led [Vincent] into excesses which had a most nefarious effect on him. He pushed him to drink, and gave him a taste for absinth -- when he was already drinking too much." (Doiteau and Leroy, p. 170.) Doiteau and Leroy refer to absinthe as the "favourite drink" of the two artists in Arles and exclaim dramatically: "How many absinths have they drunk in the last two months!" (ibid.). 280. he may well have fled Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 249: This is Merlhès's theory: "Was this act [i.e., Vincent's self-mutilation] therefore committed, as has been written on the strength of Gauguin's belated remarks, as soon as Vincent had got home or, on the contrary, had the latter returned home still more or less in possession of his senses but in a state of violent agitation and drunk several glasses of alcohol as a reflex action in order to pull himself together"? We agree that there is a high likelihood that Vincent bolstered himself with alcohol at this moment of supreme stress, whether he did it in a café or at home. 703 281. "one louis and 3 sous" BVG 571, 1/17/1889. A month later, Vincent was strangely specific about dating this quotidian incident to the day of his attack: "Let's get back in any case to the present month and speak only of money. On 23 December there was still a louis and 3 sous in the cash-box." (A "louis" was worth about 20 francs.) The specificity of Vincent's recollection suggests to us that this casual accounting probably played a much more significant role in triggering the attack that night than is generally recognized in the literature.

Context:
BVG 571, 1/17/1889: "On December 23 I still had in hand one louis and 3 sous. Today I received from you the 100 franc note."
JLB 736, 1/17/1889: "On 23 December there was still a louis and 3 sous in the cash-box. That same day I received the 100-franc note from you."

282. Dickens's haunted Redlaw

  For another image from Dickens that may have combined with or been triggered by Vincent's seasonal reading of Dickens's Christmas book, The Haunted Man.

283. the ghost of the man

That his father was on Vincent's mind at the moment of Gauguin's departure from Arles is indisputably clear from the newspaper article that Vincent tore out of the paper on that day and handed to Gauguin (see Ch. 36, n. 267 and n. 269). The key phrase that concludes that short article, "Le meurtier a pris la fuite" (the murderer has fled) -- which is echoed in Gauguin's sketchbook from Arles (see Ch. 36, n. 269) -- is precisely the phrase that Vincent used in 1882 when he angrily responded to the accusation (raised by Dorus and seconded by Theo) that Vincent's abusive behavior in Etten was killing his father. Only days after being expelled from his parents' home following another Christmastime debacle, Vincent wrote: "I already said that if I hear someone say 'you'll be the death of me,' and all the while that man is reading his newspaper and half a minute later starts talking about goodness knows what advertisement, then I find such an expression rather inappropriate and unnecessary and pay no attention to it. As soon as those words or suchlike are repeated to others, who then start to look upon me as something of a murderer or even a parricide, then I say, such calumnies are neither more nor less than Jesuitisms. So there you have it. Besides, now the murderer has left home and so, in a word, I take no notice of it, and I even think it ridiculous." (JLB 197, 1/5/1882; emphasis added.)

The line that connects these two incidents is not just the language, but also the extremity of guilt Vincent felt in both instances. In the earlier instance, of course, he refused to acknowledge that guilt, but his furious denials were proof enough of it. In the later instance, instead of denying the guilt, he transfers it to the shadow entity, the la horla-like version of himself that he sees in the mirror and tries to punish with a razor blade. Another example of Vincent's conflating of Gauguin and his father at the end of the latter's stay in Arles is Vincent's threat to pretend to be invisible in response to Gauguin's emotional withdrawal -- the same threat he used against his father right before his expulsion from the Etten parsonage around New Year's 1882 (see Ch. 36, n. 129). Finally, we have Theo's report after visiting Vincent in the hospital on Christmas Day. In a letter to Jo Bonger, he wrote that he found his brother babbling with "worries about philosophy and theology" (Van Gogh-Bonger, p. xlvi). It was axiomatic in Vincent's imagination: if he was obsessed about religion, he was thinking about his father.

284. almost crushed him BVG 564, 12/15/1888-12/31/1888. We believe this guilt is what Vincent is talking about when he writes in December 1888 referring, ostensibly, to Gauguin's mental condition upon arrival in Arles.

Context:
JLB 726, 12/17/1888 or 12/18/1888: "As for me, coming here last winter, tired and almost fainting mentally, I too suffered a little inside before I was able to begin to remake myself."

285. example of the Zemganno brothers BVG 551, 10/22/1888. Vincent mentions the book again at the end of October at the time of Gauguin's arrival, the thought of it stirred up by his extreme expenditures in preparation for the long-awaited combination. A week later, the novel's lesson lingers as talk of illness sparks another outburst of anticipatory guilt: "As for ill, I already told you I didn't think I was, but I would have become so if my expenses had had to continue. Since I was in a state of terrible anxiety about making you make an effort beyond your strength." (JLB 715, 10/29/1888; emphasis in original.)

Context:
JLB 710, 10/22/1888: "By the way, have you ever read Les frères Zemganno, by the De Goncourts [Edmond and Jules Huot]? If not, read it. If I hadn't read it I would perhaps be more daring. And even after reading it, the ONLY fear that I have is of asking you for too much money."

286. news had reached Arles Theo's reconnection with Jo Bonger was a whirlwind affair. According to Jansen and Robert, they met in Paris around December 10, 1888 (Jansen and Robert, p. 24). The official story is that they "bumped into" each other by accident while Jo was visiting her brother Andries Bonger, but clearly Jo took the initiative and went to visit Theo at that time under the pretense of patching up the friendship between Theo and Andries (ibid.). Theo admits as much in a letter to his mother at the time: "If I am perhaps giving you the idea that ours was a chance meeting, then that is wrong of me, for it was she who arranged the meeting with a great deal of tact, & noble feeling, otherwise it would never have happened. I do believe that she knew that I still loved her beforehand." (ibid.) (A contributing factor, no doubt, was that the man on whom Jo had had an unrequited crush at the time Theo proposed to her in 1887, Eduard Stumpff, a family friend [see Jansen, p. 54, n. 54], had since married.) Without Jo's pre-determination, events would never have unfolded as quickly as they did thereafter.

On December 21, less than two weeks after their reunion, Theo wrote to his mother in a rapture of relief: "I loved her too much, & now that we have seen one another a great deal these last few days, she has told me she loves me too & that she will take me the way I am. And now dear Mother I ask you to take her into your loving mother's heart. ... O Mother I am so inexpressibly happy. Can it really be true?" (ibid.) On the same day (December 21), Jo and Theo wrote Jo's parents asking permission to become engaged. Anna responded the very next day (December 22): "What a surprise! I just received your letter and am full of it and happy and I thank the good Lord for hearing my prayer." (b2389 V/1982, ''Gogh-Carbentus, Anna C. van'' to ''Gogh, Theo van'', 12/22/1888.) Her letter makes it clear she had already spread the news to Theo's sisters. The next day (December 23), Wil, who lived with her mother, sent Theo her congratulations: "I'm so thankful that you won't be alone anymore because you're not that type of person." (b2387 V/1982, ''Gogh, Willemina van'' to ''Gogh, Theo en Jo van'', 12/23/1888.) On the same day, Theo received a telegram of congratulations from Jo's brother Henry, which was tantamount to an approval of the engagement from the Bonger family, even though the parents had not weighed in yet (b0918 V/1962, "Gogh, Theo van" to "Gogh, Elisabeth van", 12/24/1888). On December 24, Theo wrote his sister Lies announcing his news with a confidence that suggests he expected their endorsement: "You are one of the first to hear my great news which will be a turning point in my life & which makes me inexpressibly happy. The news is that I am engaged to Jo Bonger." (b0918 V/1962, ''Gogh, Theo van'' to ''Gogh, Elisabeth van'', 12/24/1888.)

The question is this: What did Vincent know of these momentous family events prior to Christmas 1888? In his letters, he does not congratulate Theo on his engagement until he receives announcement letters from both Jo and Theo on January 9 (JLB 738, 1/9/1889). (According to the family chronicle, the formal announcement was made on January 7 [Van Gogh, Maria Johanna, p. 15].) However, it appears that Vincent knew about the engagement by the time Theo arrived in Arles on Christmas Day to attend his hospitalized brother. On January 1, 1889, Theo wrote Jo describing their bedside encounter: "When I mentioned you to him he evidently knew who & what I meant & when I asked whether he approved of our plans, he said yes" (Theo, quoted in Jansen, p. 76; emphasis added). If this means what it appears to mean, then Vincent knew of Theo's engagement at the time of his self-mutilation on December 23. There are two possibilities: (1) that around the same time he wrote his mother, Theo told Vincent about, or hinted at, his marriage plans in a letter or telegram that has not survived; or, (2) when Wil read Theo's letter to their mother on December 22, she immediately wrote Vincent with the "good" news. In either case, the report would have reached Vincent right before Christmas, and probably on the day of his self-mutilation.

This is far too late for the news to have had the impact on Vincent's relationship with Gauguin claimed by Theo's son (Vincent's nephew) Dr. V.W. van Gogh: "the trouble with Gauguin in Arles started right after Vincent had heard from Theo that he intended to marry" (Vincent Willem van Gogh, quoted in Lubin, p. 160). Nor do we agree with commentators like Mauron and Nagera who believe that Theo's announcement was the direct cause of Vincent's breakdown, although we do believe it played a significant contributory role, as described in the text (see Mauron, pp.75-76 and Nagera, pp. 108-109). Nagera lays out the evidence from Vincent's letters that appears to show that he did not know about Theo's engagement until he was officially notified around January 9 (JLB 738, 1/9/1889) (Nagera, pp.108-109). There are two ways to read this evidence: (1) that Vincent, in fact, did not know about the engagement and that the bedside conversation Theo reports to Jo on January 1 either was not the definitive confirmation Theo thought it was or was entirely invented by Theo; or (2) that Vincent did know about the engagement and did confirm his knowledge of it in the bedside conversation with Theo, but thereafter staunchly denied it, whether out of confusion, obstinacy, or desperation. We believe the latter is the correct reading of Nagera's evidence.

287. The two had reunited again See Ch. 36, n. 286. 288. apparently by at Jo's initiative

See Ch. 36, n. 286.

289. the secrecy of their whirlwind

See Ch. 36, n. 286. Although we consider it possible that Vincent heard the news from Theo, he almost certainly did not hear it until after the decision had been made and the requisite parental permissions applied for: that is, around December 23. None of Theo's or Vincent's surviving letters from the period mention Jo's surprising reappearance in Theo's life around December 10. Theo does not seek Vincent's advice, nor does Vincent offer his wisdom -- as both would have done at an earlier time in their relationship. The suddenness of Theo's announcement, and the secrecy that that suddenness implied -- whether the announcement came through Theo or from another source -- conveyed to Vincent just how alienated from his brother's life he had become.

290. Vincent had always suspected BVG 536, 9/11/1888.

Context:
JLB 679, 9/10/1888: "Gauguin is married, and it's very important to be aware beforehand that in the long run it's not certain that different interests will be compatible."

291. with no hope of rescue Van Gogh-Bonger, in Van Gogh, p. xlvi: In a letter to Jo Bonger written after he returned from visiting Vincent in the Arles hospital in Arles after the ear incident (as published in Bonger's Memoir), Theo writes, "It was painfully sad to witness, for at times all his suffering overwhelmed him and he tried to weep but he could not; poor fighter and poor, poor sufferer; for the moment nobody can do anything to relieve his sorrow, and yet he feels deeply and strongly. If he might have found somebody to whom he could have disclosed his heart, it would perhaps never have gone thus far." (Emphasis in original.) Theo, of course, does not recognize the extent to which this is an indictment of his constancy. 292. delirious, disoriented Lubin, p. 174: Lubin describes the "pattern" of Vincent's psychotic attacks as "delirium, disorientation, and auditory and visual hallucinations." We believe that the "horla" that Vincent saw in the mirror -- the threatening phantom that he attacked -- was the consummating hallucination of the attack on December 23, 1888. 293. and probably drunk Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography, p. 324: Even Vincent's most insistent apologist, Jan Hulsker, concedes that Vincent's self-mutilation occurred "in a moment of extreme excitement -- and perhaps drunkenness." 294. It had to be punished

We reject the argument in the literature (e.g., Lubin, pp.174-175) that Vincent's self-mutilation represented an effort to stop the "auditory hallucinations" he later reported by cutting off his ear. (See also Doiteau and Leroy, p. 181.) Surely Vincent, who had once wanted to be a doctor and took great interest in medical information, knew that cutting off one ear would not prevent him from hearing something, even if he believed that the sound originated somewhere other than inside his own head. A variation on this theory is that Vincent heard a hallucinatory "command" to cut off his ear (ibid.). We are also unpersuaded by the commentary that attempts to connect Vincent's self-mutilation to the ritual cutting-off of the bull's ear in the ring (see, e.g., ibid., p. 180). There are other, even more strained efforts to find precedents for Vincent's act: in the decapitation of a priest in Celtic legend (Webster, pp. 210-211); and in ancient Japanese courtship custom (Childs, in Homburg, p. 133). Many of these depend for their parallel on the part of the story in which Vincent gives the piece of severed ear to the prostitute Rachel as a bizarre love token -- a version of events that we do not credit (see Ch. 36, n. 314).

295. a lifetime inflicting discomfort The literature on self-mutilation draws a direct line between minimal acts of self-mutilation, acts of self-mortification, and more significant forms of self-mutilation, which potentially lead to serious bodily harm. According to Walsh and Rosen, "Inevitably, as researchers and clinicians have studied self-mutilation, they have attempted to develop categories. The earliest attempt was Menninger's, published in 1935. He discussed self-mutilation in terms of six categories: (1) 'neurotic self-mutilations,' which included such behavior as nail biting, skin picking, disfiguring hair removal, and the obtaining of unnecessary surgery; (2) 'religious self-mutilations,' such as ascetic self-flagellation and genital self-mutilation; (3) 'puberty rites,' such as hymen removal, clitoral alteration, and circumcision; (4) 'self-mutilation in psychotic patients,' such as self-enucleation, ear removal, genital self-mutilation, and extremity amputation; (5) 'self-mutilations in organic diseases,' such as intentional fracturing of fingers and self-enucleation in patients suffering from encephalitis; and finally (6) 'self-mutilation in normal people: customary and conventional forms,' which included such acts as nail clipping, trimming of hair, and the shaving of beards." (Walsh and Rosen, pp. 7-8.) Reviewing the literature, it is difficult not to see a line between minor forms of self-mortification, ranging from the seeming innocuous, such as nail clipping and the trimming of hair -- or Vincent sleeping on a wooden plank in the cold in the Borinage or shaving his head prior to painting his self-portrait as a bonze in Arles -- to more extreme forms, such as his self-cudgeling while in Amsterdam and The Hague, periods of self-starvation throughout his life, and the ingestion of turpentine in Arles and paints in Saint-Rémy. Although all of these behaviors could have proceeded from a desire for self-annihilation, they much more liked proceeded from what Walsh and Rosen label a desire to "reduce comfortable affect," or, in layman's language, a desire to overwhelm and assuage tremendous feelings of guilt, anger, loneliness, and unhappiness (ibid., p. 26). This sequence of behaviors and the motivations behind them are significant to an understanding of Vincent's occasional thoughts of suicide and the gun-shot wound that ended his life [long note at the end of this chapter]). 704 296. the sword wounds inflicted Renan, p. 198: The story is related most fully in John 18:10-11: "Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest's servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus. Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the scabbard: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" The story also appears in Matthew 26:51; Mark 14:47; and Luke 22:51, but John is the only Gospel that names the apostle (Simon Peter) and the victim (Malchus, a servant of the high priest). Luke has Jesus healing the ear. In addition to the Bible version, Vincent would have read about the incident in Renan's La vie de Jésus: "However this may be, it is certain that there was some show of resistance on the part of the disciples. One of them (Peter, according to eye-witnesses) drew his sword, and wounded the ear of one of the servants of the high priest, named Malchus." Note that Renan's version does not include a full severing of the ear, just a wounding. 297. the brutal exorcisms of Zola's Zola, Le rêve (The Dream), pp. 29-30. In Le rêve, which Vincent had only recently read, Zola lavishes his descriptive powers on the battle with demons that obsessed the medieval mind: "The more the demons are driven away, the more they return. ... They moved, they talked and cried, by the voice of the person possessed, whose body they shook as if by a tempest. At each corner of the highways an afflicted one is seen, and the first saint who passes contends with the evil spirits. They enter by the eyes, the ears, and by the mouth, and, after days of fearful struggling, they go out with loud groanings. Basilus, to save a young man, contends personally with the Evil One. Macarius was attacked when in a cemetery, and passed a whole night in defending himself. The angels, even at deathbeds, in order to secure the soul of the dying were obliged to beat the demons." In Zola's account, the devil deserved and received similarly brutal treatment: "Feeble women throw him down: Margaret crushes his head with her feet, and Juliana beats him with her chain." 298. mutilations in La terre Zola, La terre (The Earth), pp. 448-449: "Without answering, Delphin turned round and with his left hand picked up a little hatchet beside the wall, used for splitting sticks. Then he calmly laid his right forefinger on the edge of the table and, with a sharp blow, chopped it off." 299. and Germinal Favazza and Favazza, pp. 20-21: The authors cite the memorable scene in Germinal in which a hated shopkeeper Maigrat, pursued by a mob, falls to his death and is castrated by the crowd: "The other women pulled off his trousers and raised his legs. Mother Brule separated his thighs, grabbed his genitals, and tore them off the corpse. 'I've got it! I've got it,' she laughed triumphantly. Another woman said, 'Swine! You won't fill our daughters anymore! We don't have to offer you our backside in return for a loaf of bread anymore.' The women shook with terrible gaiety and spat on the lump of hairy, bleeding flesh. Mother Brule then planted the whole lump on the end of her stick, and holding it in the air, bore it about like a banner, rushing along the road, followed, helter-skelter, by the yelling troop of women. Drops of blood rained down, and that pitiful flesh hung like a waste piece of meat on a butcher's stall." 300. The traitorous brother Zola, La faute de l'abbé Mouret (The Sin of Father Mouret), p. 299: In La faute de l'Abbé Mouret, which Vincent read in August 1882 (JLB 259, 8/26/1882), in The Hague, but mentioned as recently as July 1888 (JLB 638, 7/10/1888 or 7/10/1888), a friar named Brother Archangias plots to separate the hero, Serge Mouret (a Rougon), from his inamorata Albine, the feral girl of the Paradou garden. As a result, Albine commits suicide. At her funeral, Albine's uncle and guardian, an old atheist named Jeanbernat, sneaks up behind Archangias. "Then, as Father Mouret was finishing the prayers, [Jeanbernat ] calmly pulled a knife from his pocket, opened it, and chopped off the friar's ear. No one had time to interfere. The friar screamed. 'The left one's for later,' Jeanbernat said peacefully as he threw the ear to the ground. And he left. Everyone was so stunned that he was not even followed. Brother Archangias had fallen on the pile of fresh soil from the grave. He had tried to stop the bleeding with his handkerchief." Kôdera argues that La faute de l'abbé Mouret held a special interest for Vincent because one of the novel's characters was a young acolyte of Mouret named Vincent who had "unruly red hair" (cheveux rouge en broussaille) (Kôdera, p. 137). It was typical of Vincent to identify with minor characters in books he read, but this Vincent plays no role in the ear incident which may have figured in the blur of images and hallucinations Vincent experienced on the night of December 23, 1888. 301. pulled at the lobe Doiteau and Leroy, p. 178: Doiteau and Leroy rather drily describe Vincent's approach to the challenge: "logically it is the upper half [of the ear] which should have been severed and that is what would have happened if Van Gogh had grasped his ear by its upper edge, a more natural gesture for carrying out this act than taking it by the lobe as he did. And that is why the pinna was not cut off in its entirety. It is far more difficult to cut off one's pinna level with one's head by holding it by the lobe instead of holding it by its uppermost point. But Vincent was in an utterly confused state when he carried out his act of mutilation, and seized and severed his ear at random." We would dispute only the final "at random." (We want to thank Dr. Gregory Greco for helping us understand the physiology of the ear incident.) 302. slashed at the offending flesh Merlhès identifies another image that may have had a place in Vincent's tortured imagination on the night of December 23, 1888 (Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 247). Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (The Pickwick Papers) (1837) includes one entry entitled "A Madman's Manuscript" -- a Le Horla-like diary of a narrator driven mad by a ghost-like spirit. It includes this line: "Oh! the pleasure of stropping the razor day after day, feeling the sharp edge, and thinking of the gash one stroke of its thin bright point would make!" According to Pabst, Vincent read The Pickwick Papers in 1877, in Dordrecht, and quoted from it (inaccurately) in Letter JLB 101, 1/21/1877 (Pabst, p. 77). 303. at about the midpoint Doiteau and Leroy, p. 178: Doiteau and Leroy offer the most complete and well-researched hypothesis of the extent of the wound to Vincent's left ear: "Therefore the cut began at the lower edge of the pinna, towards the point where the middle third joins the lower third, then it continued on to the fossa of the helix, across the antihelix above where its two branches begin, followed the line of the upper part of the concha, then cut across the tragus and finished at the point where the lobe joins the cheek."

This touches an issue of great controversy in the literature: namely, whether Vincent cut off his entire ear or only a part of it. Gauguin introduced this controversy into the record by claiming dramatically that Vincent "cut off his ear flush with his head" (ibid., p. 43). Furthermore, in 1929, the doctor who treated Vincent at the hospital in Arles after his self-mutilation, Dr. Félix Rey, reported to Doiteau in unequivocal terms that he had received a whole ear from the police the next day (too late to re-attach it, he said). Rey had kept the ear in a jar which sometime later disappeared. "What is there left to say about this ear?" he added conclusively. "Some say it was half an ear, others a whole ear. I, who treated Vincent and kept his ear in a jar, know what I am talking about." (Rey, quoted in ibid., p. 183.) But people like Signac and Jo Bonger and Dr. Paul Gachet who saw Vincent subsequently, both in Arles and in Auvers, saw a portion of the mutilated ear remaining -- so much, in fact, that, when Vincent was seen from face-on, the damage could go unnoticed. (See ibid., p.179.) Dr. Gachet, who saw Vincent in Auvers in 1890, made an etching of the artist at that time showing that the entire pinna (outer portion) of the ear was not taken off, but the missing portion was more than just a lobe. It is on the basis of these later witnesses that Doiteau and Leory draws his conclusion that only the lower half of the ear was removed.

304. the fierce, arterial bleeding Doiteau and Leroy, pp. 178-179: According to Doiteau and Leroy: "The bleeding was profuse. ... The abundant blood supply to the pinna is well-known, and it is thanks to this that it is possible to re-join more or less extensive sections which have become completely detached from the rest of the organ. The haemorrhage was due to cutting through the inferior anterior auricular artery or tragus artery and its sub-branch the artery of the lobe. It is fairly likely that the middle auricular artery or artery of the root of the helix was cut. These two arteries are sub-branches of the superficial temporal artery, which is itself a branch of the external carotid. On the posterior face of the pinna the inferior group of branches of the posterior auricular, another branch of the external carotid was certainly cut ... It is easy to understand the profuse bleeding given that five arteries were severed: the mid-anterior auricular artery, the inferior anterior auricular artery and its branch, and the superior and inferior stems of the posterior auricular artery." Vincent apparently heard a description something like this from his doctors in the hospital, as he wrote Theo authoritatively two weeks later that he had experienced "a lot of fever following a very considerable loss of blood, as an artery was severed" (JLB 732, 1/7/1889; emphasis in original). 305. he scurried to the kitchen See Ch. 36, n. 306. 306. in search of more towels Gauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 127: According to Gauguin's account, which seems reliable on this issue: "He must have taken some time in stopping the hemorrhage, for the next day there were many wet towels scattered about on the floor tiles of the two rooms downstairs. The blood had stained the two rooms and the little staircase that led up to our bedroom." We think Gauguin's account supports our belief that Vincent performed the act in his bedroom where there was a mirror and where he shaved. He probably tried first to staunch the bleeding with handkerchiefs but, finding them inadequate, came downstairs to the kitchen for dish-towels and running water. If he had cut himself downstairs, there would be no reason for a trail of bloody towels through the rest of the house. By the time he returned to the house after delivering the ear fragment and made his way up to his bedroom, where he was found, the wound would presumably have no longer required compression to prevent bleeding and there would not have been a trail of blood in the hall or studio to arouse police suspicion. 307. He would find Gauguin

Rewald, p. 243: Rewald gamely introduced this possibility into the literature: "After he succeeded in stopping the abundant flow of blood, [Vincent] covered his head with a large beret, washed his severed ear, wrapped it up, and rushed to the brothel which the two friends usually patronized. It is not impossible that Vincent went there in the hope of finding Gauguin." Not surprisingly, the literature heavily prefers the more romantic narrative that Vincent came looking for the prostitute Rachel, not his fellow painter. While we believe Vincent intended (in some mix of conscious and unconscious motivation) for Gauguin to see the sacrifice he had made by severing his ear (see Ch. 36, n. 314), the consensus view again favors the prostitute. This despite the fact that the record is relatively clear that Vincent never actually confronted Rachel ("Gaby") that night (see Ch. 36, n. 314) and may not even have designated her as the specific recipient, but only left the package with the brothel keeper (the "sentry"), who made the decision to take it to Rachel because (1) Gauguin was actually in the room with Rachel at the time (see Ch. 36, n. 313); or (2) Gauguin was a regular customer of Rachel and therefore giving it to her seemed the most efficient way of conveying the package to its intended recipient, Gauguin. A policeman named Robert (see Ch. 36, n. 313) reported that when he went to collect the ear, Rachel gave it to him "in front of her boss," whom he elsewhere identifies only by the name "Virginie." This, and the testimony that Rachel did not perceive the gift as personal to her (see Ch. 36, n. 314) would indicate that Vincent's gesture had nothing to do with his relationship with Rachel and everything to do with Rachel's relationship with Gauguin and, ultimately, his relationship with Gauguin.

308. then he would reconsider In a letter to Gauguin a month after the event, Vincent wrote: "I feel remorse at having indeed perhaps prompted your departure -- unless, however, that departure was premeditated beforehand? And that then it was perhaps up to me to show that I still had the right to be kept frankly au courant." (JLB 739, 1/21/1889.) In the last line, Vincent comes close to admitting that he cut off his ear because he felt that Gauguin was cutting him out of "the picture" and therefore he, Vincent, was forced to reassert ("to show") his right to remain in the picture with a dramatic gesture. 309. in a piece of newspaperDoiteau and Leroy, p. 174. (See Ch. 36, n. 311.) 310. a few minutes' walk The sources differ on the exact distance from the Yellow House to this brothel -- Merlhès puts it at "some 300 metres" while Tralbaut halves that to "only a hundred and fifty yards" -- it was definitely very close -- no more than a five minute walk, even if Vincent was understandably dragging (Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 249 and Tralbaut, p. 260). 311. Vincent asked to see "Gaby" Doiteau and Leroy, p. 174: This and many other details of the night of December 23 come from a witness who did not submit testimony on the subject until thirty years later. In 1929, Victor Doiteau located the policeman who was on duty in the red-light district of Arles on December 23, 1888. Doiteau gives the officer only the name "M. Robert" and reproduces in full the letter he wrote giving his account of that infamous night:

      "Dear Sir,
      In answer to your kind letter dated the 6th of this month, please find below the information you requested.
      At that time in 1888 I was a police officer; on the day of the incident I was on duty in the red-light district. As I passed brothel no.1, then in the rue du Bout d'Arles, run by a certain Virginie, the name of the girl concerned escapes me, her pseudonym was Gaby, anyway the latter, in front of her boss, gave me a newspaper containing the ear saying here is the gift the painter gave us; I ask them a few questions, I note the package and I have stated that there is a whole ear in it, it's my duty to tell my boss about it directly; police superintendent Ornano started a search for him without further ado and went off to his house with some other officers, I don't remember their names and as for me I went off on duty into the red-light district as I said earlier. ...
      Yours sincerely,
Robert

 312. would not let him pass

Gauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 127. (See Ch. 36, n. 314.)

313. Gauguin was within

Bernard, n.p.: In his account to Bernard only a few days after the events of December 23 (see Ch. 36, n. 314), Gauguin apparently reported that the prostitute Gaby "fainted immediately" when the package was opened. (This is confirmed in Vincent's later report in JLB 745, 2/3/1889; see Ch. 36, n. 314.) How could Gauguin have known this so soon afterwards if, as he claimed, he left Arles before Vincent was conscious and therefore certainly before the police had had a chance to gather testimony from witnesses like Gaby? Either he was in the brothel with Gaby when the package was opened, or he heard this fragment of rumor circulating in the brief time he spent with the police inspectors at the Yellow House the following day before his quick flight from Arles. This at least introduces the possibility that he was where Vincent thought he was -- in the brothel -- and helps explain how Gaby was introduced into the drama playing out between the two artists. Of course, it would not be necessary for Gauguin to have actually been at the brothel for Vincent to have believed -- either truly or delusionally -- that in tendering his package to Gaby he was giving it to Gauguin, which is the argument of the text.

314. "sentry"

Gauguin, in Stein, ed., p. 127: This is from Gauguin's later account: "When [Vincent] was in good enough condition to go out, his head covered up by a Basque beret pulled all the way down, he went straight to a house where, for want of a fellow-countrywoman, one can find a chance acquaintance, and gave the 'sentry' his ear, carefully washed and enclosed in an envelope." Gauguin puts the word "sentry" in quotations, suggesting a wry dignification of brothel keepers in their much-despised role as bouncers. This contradicts the oft-repeated story that Vincent gave the ear directly to the prostitute Rachel, known as Gaby, which is based on a short report that appeared in the local newspaper, Forum Républican, a week later (December 30, 1888): "Last Sunday, at 11:30 p.m., Vincent Vangogh [sic], a painter from Holland, turned up at house of prostitution no. 1, asked for one called Rachel and handed her his ear, saying 'Take good care of this'" (Gauguin in Merlhès, Paul Gauguin et Vincent van Gogh, 1887-1888: Lettres retrouvées, sources ignorées, p. 249). But Gauguin's version is confirmed by the memory of the police officer on duty that night in the brothel district who responded to the call from No. 1 rue du Bout d'Arles (see Ch. 36, n. 311). Officer Robert recalled that Gaby "in front of her boss, gave me a newspaper containing the ear saying here is the gift the painter gave us." Note "us," not "me."

Given Vincent's appearance (in his delirium, it is doubtful that he did a thorough job of cleaning himself up), it is hardly surprising that the brothel keeper barred him. Vincent admits as much in a letter from February 1889 in which he recalled his trip to the brothel that night: "Yesterday I went back to see the girl I went to when I went out of my mind. I was told there that things like that aren't at all surprising around here. She had suffered from it and had fainted but had regained her composure. And what's more, people say good things of her." (JLB 745, 2/3/1889.) But even if it is fully credited, this memory only speaks to Vincent's intent to see Rachel that night in December and Vincent's report of her actions upon receiving the package sound second-hand (indeed, Gauguin reported them to Bernard in December [see Ch. 36, n. 313]). Also note the quick switch from the third-person singular ("the girl") to the plural ("people"), indicating that Vincent spoke to others at the brothel about the incident -- not necessarily exclusively, or at all, to Rachel herself. We believe that, in a similar way, Vincent gave the ear to "them," and they forwarded it to Rachel, a surrogate for Gauguin. (See Ch. 36, n. 307.)

315. "Remember me"

Bernard, n.p.: This is our effort to reconcile the various versions of the message that Vincent left to be passed on with the package containing part of his ear. In his account given only a few days later (see Ch. 36, n. 266), Gauguin has Vincent saying, "You will remember me, truly you will." But in his much later account in Avant et après, Gauguin changed the wording: "'Here,' [Vincent] said, 'a remembrance of me'" (Gauguin, in Stein, p. 127). These are similar enough. However, the newspaper article (see Ch. 36, n. 266) that appeared a few days after Gauguin gave his account to Bernard reports a different version of the message, presumably gleaned from police or other witnesses: "[Van Gogh] asked for one [prostitute] called Rachel and handed her his ear, saying 'Take good care of this.'" Although they vary in form, these different versions strike the same nostalgic, elegiac note suggesting that Vincent intended to convey the ear fragment (to Gauguin, we believe [see Ch. 36, n. 313]) as a bizarre memento of their time together in the Yellow House.

316. the scarlet blanket

See Ch. 36, n. 313.

317. even welcoming Five months after the incident (May 1889), Vincent recalled this about it: "Now the shock had been such that it disgusted me even to move, and nothing would have been so agreeable to me as never to wake up again" (JLB 776, 5/23/1889).

The literature on self-mutilating behavior explicitly refutes the seemingly self-evident but ultimately misleading premise that self-mutilating behavior and suicidal behavior are just different degrees of response to the same psychological crises. According to Walsh and Rosen, the early literature considered self-mutilation to be a variant of suicide and described it using terms like "partial suicide," "focal suicide," "attempted suicide" and "parasuicide" (Walsh and Rosen, p 20). But even the early literature, which assumed that the two behaviors were closely connected, made clear distinctions between them. In 1935, Karl Menninger wrote that "Self-mutilation is the net result of a conflict between (1) the aggressive destructive impulses aided by the superego and (2) the will to live, whereby a partial or local self-destruction serves the purpose of gratifying irresistible urges and at the same time averting the prelogical but anticipated consequences thereof. ... While apparently a form of attenuated suicide, self-mutilation is actually a compromise formation to avert total annihilation, that is to say, suicide. In this sense it represents a victory, sometimes a Pyrrhic victory, of the life instinct over the death instinct, (Menninger, pp. 465-466)."

The more recent literature emphasizes even more clearly the contradictions between the two behaviors. In 1979, R.R. Ross and H.B. McKay wrote that "There is in the action of the self-mutilator seldom an intent to die and often very little risk of dying. Although a self-mutilator could engender his own death by his behavior, in the vast majority of cases, this does not happen. His behavior is actually counter-intentional to suicide rather than suicidal" (Ross and McKay, p. 15). See also the important discussion of the issue in Walsh and Rosen (pp. 3-53). They argue that "The similarities between suicide and self-mutilation can be deceiving. Both forms of behavior are self-directed, and both result in concrete physical harm. Nonetheless, when the behaviors are analyzed using the framework of Shneidman's 10 commonalities, it is evident that the behaviors are different in many facets, and in several ways are even opposites" (Walsh and Rosen, p. 51).

Walsh and Rosen, summarize the various arguments and research results on the subject of self-mutilating behavior, and address the perpetrator's intent for engaging in an act of self-mutilation (Walsh and Rosen, pp. 26-28). They write that, "For example, in Gardner and Gardner's (1975) study of self-mutilators, 19 of 22 subjects cited relief of tension as a primary reason for self-cutting. Eleven subjects also cited intense anger as a reason for self-harm. That is, they perceived the self-mutilation to be the best method available for reducing uncomfortable affect. However, Gardner and Gardner also reported that 9 of these 22 mutilators cited suicidal thoughts as being associated with their self-mutilating acts." (ibid., citing Gardner and Gardner, pp. 127-132.) Walsh and Rosen summarize that the studies show, at best, "highly ambiguous results" concerning the connection between self-mutilating behavior and suicidal behavior.

Walsh and Rosen emphasize both the complexity of the motivation for suicidal acts: "undendurable psychological pain, … frustrated psychological needs, … deferred psychological needs, … cessation of consciousness, … [and] hopeless-helplessness," among others (Walsh and Rosen, pp. 41-46). The motivations for self-mutilating behavior, on the other hand, are more typically "escalating, intermittent psychological pain, … deferred psychological needs, … achieving short-term alleviation, … an alteration in consciousness, … alienation, … [and] resignation" (ibid.). Self-mutilating behavior results from "chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom, … frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, … a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of overidealization and devaluation, … marked shifts from baseline mood to depression, irritability, or anxiety, usually lasting a few days and only rare more than a few days, …. inappropriate, intense anger or lack of control of anger: e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights, … marked and persistent identity disturbance manifested by uncertainty about at least two of the following: self-image, sexual orientation, long-term goals or career choice, type of friends desired, preferred values, … [and] impulsiveness in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging: e.g., spending, sex, [and] substance use … (Walsh and Rosen, pp. 99-106).

Walsh and Rosen's description of typical self-mutilating behavior comes close to a description of Vincent's specific behavior patterns at times of intense psychological crisis. The act of cutting off his ear could have been any, some, or all of the following: a cry for help, an effort to relieve tension, an act of anger, an act of despair; it is highly unlikely that it was an attempt at suicide.

Nonetheless, even if cutting off his ear was not a suicidal act, it showed that some of the predicates for a death wish -- if not a specific suicidal intent -- were in place. Walsh and Rosen address studies of "the intent of self-mutilation on the part of the perpetrator" and conclude that "the studies that have attempted to answer this question have yielded highly ambiguous results. … Although it may be possible to differentiate self-mutilative behavior from suicidal behavior, it should not be assumed that self-mutilators will never be suicidal. An important finding in the study [by Gardner and Gardner in 1975, pp. 127-32] was that 16 (or 31%) of the 52 mutilators had made serious suicide attempts while in care or shortly before." (Walsh and Rosen, pp. 26-28.)

Our conclusion is that although Vincent did not display the typical patterns of behavior associated with suicidal behavior as opposed to self-mutilating behavior, if he were presented with the opportunity to die, he might well have welcomed it. This is, of course, precisely what happened at the end of Vincent's life, when he refused life-saving medical treatment for an "accidental" gunshot wound.