Leaving Van Gogh (7 page)

But there was no reason why he should, I had to remind myself. I was the doctor, he the patient, and one does not anticipate that the patient shall turn and diagnose the one who is supposed to cure him. Further, I had been painted before and was painted again afterward without expecting such profound revelations. It was just that Vincent was so extraordinary that one tended to expect marvels from him. Disappointment was inevitable.

F
ive

V
INCENT WORKED
almost exclusively in oils when he was with us. He made some pencil drawings while he was in Auvers, but he was first and foremost a colorist. Yet he was always curious about other ways of making images. One day, not long after he painted my portrait, we were in my studio looking at the etchings Cézanne had made back in 1873. Among them was a little sketch, very precious to me, of Cézanne preparing the copper plate for an etching while I look on. Pissarro had drawn it on a scrap of black-edged letter paper he’d found in my drawer, left over, I suppose, from the period of mourning after Blanche’s death. The black border lends a strange emphasis to an informal record of a collaboration.

“So the three of you made etchings together?” Vincent asked.

“On several occasions,” I confirmed. “You can imagine what a challenge it was for Cézanne to think about line instead of color. He was painting almost entirely with the palette knife in those days, in blocks of color, so he had to proceed very differently.” I leafed through the little prints in the folder, and pulled out one of the painter Armand Guillaumin, seated somewhat awkwardly on the ground. It had a certain freshness but was undeniably clumsy.

“Yes,” Vincent agreed. “You can see here, on the shoulder, that the line is quite tentative.”

“Mind you, it’s not a simple process. First you have to remember that your image is going to be reversed. Then you also have to pull the needle through the varnish on the plate. If it’s been correctly prepared, the resistance is consistent, but when the three of us were working together back then, Cézanne was a novice. He might have been using a plate that he’d covered himself, as you see in the drawing. Then the needle would have moved slower or faster depending on how evenly the varnish had been applied.”

Vincent glanced at the small press that took up rather too much of the space in the studio. I had not used it in some time, and there were stacks of paper and boxes of charcoal piled on it.

“Could we try it?” he asked. “Perhaps I could make a series of etchings after my own works, for sale.”

“Of course we could.” I moved to lift the clutter from the bed of the press. “In the cabinet near the window you will find some copper plates,” I told him, pointing. “I think there are several sizes. We’ll start with something small.” He followed my instructions and brought out a clean copper plate. I had a moment’s qualm; the waxy varnish would require heating before we could paint it onto the plate. The fastest way to heat it would be on the stove, but Madame Chevalier would not be pleased to see us entering her kitchen.

Vincent evidently shared my trepidation, for as we went down the stairs, burdened with the etcher’s equipment, he said to me in a low voice, “I would not want to be in your housekeeper’s way. Perhaps we can work in the garden?”

“Absolutely. But we must melt the varnish on the stove. Here.” I handed him the needles, the rags, and the sealed vial of acid. “The acid is terribly strong, so be careful with it.”

Madame Chevalier was sitting at the table peeling a large pile of potatoes when I pushed through the door into the kitchen. “May I help you, Doctor?”

“I don’t want to disturb you,” I said, “but Monsieur Vincent asked if I could show him how to etch, and I must warm the varnish for the plate. May I just put it on the stove?”

She stood, as I had known she would, and pushed the metal bowl a few centimeters back from where I had placed it on the stove’s surface. Over the years she had become a master at communicating without resorting to words. This little gesture demonstrated to me that she was mistress of the stove top, not I. “What were you planning to use to stir this with, Doctor?”

I looked into the bowl, where the black substance was turning liquid around the edges. “Not one of my spoons!” she warned me as I lifted a hand toward the jug of implements next to the stove. I sighed and went back up the stairs to my studio, to find an appropriate brush.

Later, while Vincent was carefully stroking the black varnish onto the plate, Madame Chevalier surprised me by coming out the kitchen door with a pitcher and glasses on a tray. She set it down on the nearby bench, saying, “Here is some mint syrup, gentlemen. I thought you might be feeling the heat.” She straightened up and looked at the two of us. “Monsieur Vincent, would you like to wear one of the doctor’s hats? The sun is very strong.”

“You are very kind, Madame Chevalier,” he answered, “but after my time in the South, I barely feel your northern sun. Thank you anyway.”

She nodded sharply and stumped back into the house.

“Madame Chevalier does not usually coddle my guests,” I commented to Vincent. “She must have taken a liking to you.”

“She terrified me the first day I visited here. When she opened the gate, she looked so fierce that I almost ran off down the street.”

“She is inclined to be protective of us. Apparently she now considers you one of the family. I am afraid that means she will nag you to eat.”

“Do you think she would pose for me, Doctor? I love to paint those older ladies with their determined faces. And her coloring is so interesting.”

I had never noticed Madame Chevalier’s coloring before. Now that it was pointed out to me, I realized that her ruddy face and bright blue eyes were, indeed, striking. I wondered how Vincent would render them. “I expect she will tell you that she does not have enough time to sit for a portrait,” I answered, “but you may ask her, of course. Now what will be the subject of your first etching?”

“I thought perhaps you would pose,” Vincent answered. “As I have already painted you, I have worked out some of the fundamental questions of tone, what needs to be darker or lighter, and how pronounced those variations should be. This way I can concentrate on using the needle. Do I handle it as if it were a pen?”

“Almost,” I answered. “You have no control over the width of the line, of course. And you should try to keep it perpendicular to the plate. You will also need a light touch. You are just removing the varnish; the acid will make the mark in the plate.”

“Would you sit at the table?” he asked me. “In that chair, leaning on the table? Just like the painted portrait. And for dark areas, I assume I should make some kind of hatching pattern?”

“Yes, like an ink drawing. The closer the lines, the darker the tone.”

He went to work quickly, showing no hesitation. The copper plate lay on the table between us, and Vincent’s eyes moved back and forth between it and me. “I think I would like to include your pipe, Doctor, do you have it nearby?”

I almost cautioned him against making the composition too complex. Etching is disconcerting. Most artists new to the technique would have experimented with something simple, like a vase of flowers or a few apples on a plate. But Vincent grasped the process with remarkable speed. No doubt he was helped by the fact that, as he said, he had already analyzed the patterns of dark and light made by my face. Yet he managed, in his first and only etching, to communicate not only what I looked like, what I was wearing, and my expression, but the texture of my hair and coat. He even sketched in some of the garden behind me, somehow indicating the distance between me and the nearest rosebush.

I had already acknowledged to myself that Vincent van Gogh was enormously talented. I knew that my experience as an artist helped me to understand how exceptional his paintings were. But for years I had thought of myself as primarily an etcher. If I, a doctor, had an artistic medium, it was this one, the elaborate and messy process of etching, biting in acid, wiping the plate, inking it, and finally printing an impression on dampened paper. When Vincent had asked to try his hand at it, I was pleased to think that I could be the expert. His portrait of me,
L’Homme à la pipe
, showed me definitively that this was not so. His first attempt at a notoriously difficult medium demonstrated once again the magnitude of his artistic gift.

When I began my externship at the Salpêtrière, in 1855, I was twenty-six and advanced in my medical studies. By then I had already trained with a surgeon and with a general physician. I had seen the human heart laid bare and had taken a saw to living bone. Yet our mad patients drew my interest as no others had. There seemed to be so little, sometimes, between us. Who has not felt the shroud of melancholy, that pall of listlessness that devalues any effort and washes all color to gray? Who has not become attached to a notion and blindly refused to see reason? Who has not chosen to see himself as something entirely other than what he is?

They seized my imagination, these madwomen. I spent more and more time at the hospital and neglected my other studies. But the lectures in the vast amphitheater of the Faculté de Médecine, delivered by gray-haired professors in academic robes, seemed to have very little to do with helping human beings in pain. I thought we could do better.

One of Dr. Pinel’s innovations was to distinguish among the different kinds of mental disturbance. Until his direction of the asylum, the epileptic and the idiotic, the violent and the meekly melancholy were all housed together. Pinel established the first classifications of madness—differentiating among melancholia, mania, dementia, and idiocy—and attempted to relieve them. Yet some patients improved, while others did not. It seemed clear that we could not successfully cure madness until we knew what caused it, which was one of the great debates of the day. Many patients who died were autopsied. Their brains and nerves were searched for lesions or anomalies so that connections could be made between anatomy and behavior. Perhaps there were other physical causes so far undiagnosed. So we studied the madwomen with intensity, taking notes and consulting each other. I began to carry a pocket journal, in which I took down fleeting impressions. “Kindness is not drowned in madness,” I wrote one day. “Ursule and Marie-Ange often walk in the courtyard with Yvonne. She does not appear to recognize them.” And “Certain sounds are especially disturbing to the women. I hate to see them flinching when the bells chime the hours.”

Most of our patients were poor and came from the dark, damp, congested, disease-ridden parts of Paris. This was before the famous transformation of our city under Baron Haussmann. The broad boulevards and grandiose monuments like the new Opéra did not yet exist. Instead there were large areas, like the entire Île de la Cité, where medieval buildings leaned together across moist alleys, where chunks of fetid plaster dropped from walls, where families of eight crowded into a single room, a single bed. The Salpêtrière, with its rows of beds and refectory tables, its regular meals and tall windows, its sympathetic treatment of inmates and measured, predictable periods of work and leisure, provided many patients with a level of health and comfort they had not previously known. Sometimes their mental states improved swiftly.

Many earnest efforts were made to counter the tedium inherent in an establishment like the Salpêtrière, whose buildings and courtyards, though spacious, tended toward gloom. The notion of moral treatment included extensive recreation for the patients. They spent time in the courtyards each day and went to services in the chapel if they chose. There were performances and social events, like the annual
bal des folles
, a costume ball that traditionally took place a few Sundays before Easter. The patients spent hours beforehand planning their costumes and hours afterward discussing the party. At first I found the idea of the costume ball bizarre—when you are already mad, a stranger to yourself, why dress up as someone else?—but I realized after witnessing it myself how important it was in breaking up the monotony of life in an institution.

A few weeks after the ball, I unintentionally provided another distraction for some of the women in my division. My superior Dr. Falret was in charge of two hundred women, mostly victims of melancholia or manias. The madwomen seemed to like me, though I suspected they did not take me as seriously as I would have hoped. I often spent my free time with them during their recreation sessions, which grew livelier as the weather warmed. Some of the enclosures had grass or flowers, which were highly valued by the patients. Woe to the woman who stepped off the slate path onto the tender green blades and jeopardized their growth! She would be shrilly scolded by her fellow patients. In the graveled courts, the patients had more freedom to move. Some skipped aimlessly like children and loved to play with a ball. Some drifted around as if hearing private music, raising their arms, swaying, bowing. When I could, I would sit on a bench and watch, or talk to the women who approached me. They were like all of us in this: they loved attention.

Of course not everything they told you was true. They gossiped eagerly about each other, but with even greater zeal about us, the doctors. According to them, we were always madly in love with our patients.

I was sitting on a stone bench in a patch of sun one day when this amorous fantasy was brought up. Next to me was Laure, a patient—and a former nurse—a little older than I who had actually grown up in the Salpêtrière. Her case was not especially unusual. What could be more normal in this enclosed world than a marriage between a gardener, her father, and a nurse, her mother? And what more normal than that the daughter of such a marriage should take up her mother’s occupation? It had struck me as strange at first that she should have gone mad. Could madness be contagious, then? Or was she feigning illness? Trading the authority of a staff member for the fecklessness of the patient? I could not decide, but I always listened carefully to Laure.