Van Gogh (134 page)

Like Vincent, Maupassant’s narrator suffered from sleepless nights, attacks of nerves, and strange visions. Over the course of a few months, recorded day by day in excruciating detail, he descends into madness. He comes to distrust his senses and fear his dreams (“this perfidious sleep”). He imagines himself the unwitting victim of a hypnotist or a sleepwalker living a mysterious double life. Gradually, he slips from vague unease into paranoid fear and then into terrifying delirium. He feels the constant presence of a menacing spirit—an “invisible being” determined to suck the life out of him, then plunge a knife into him while he sleeps. It stalks him, like Musset’s black-clad wretch, drinking his water at night, turning the pages of his book, stealing his reflection in the mirror. He compares it to the “fairies, gnomes, and ghosts” of ancient lore, and especially
to the most frightening delusion that ever haunted men’s minds: “the conception of God.”

His hallucinatory visions grow stronger and stranger. He sees objects move in midair, as if guided by an unseen hand. He feels chained to his chair, unable to escape—“an enslaved and terrified spectator” at his own undoing. He fights off madness for as long as possible with the same brave pretense of logic and self-awareness that Vincent used as a bulwark against the disorder in his head. “I ask myself whether I am mad,” he records in his diary. “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.” But finally he succumbs. In a furious attack of paranoia, he tries to kill his invisible tormentor by trapping it in his room and setting fire to the building. When that plot fails, he turns his avenging terror on himself. “No—no—there is no doubt about it,” he cries out at the end of the story, vowing to pursue his fight against the
horla
to its inevitable conclusion. “He is not dead. Then—then—I suppose I must kill
MYSELF!”

In the Yellow House, too, events spiraled out of control. Vehement outbursts of debate punctuated every day. “Our arguments are
terribly electric
,” Vincent told Theo. They argued “until our nerves were strained to the point of stifling all human warmth,” he lamented. Gauguin tried to defuse his host’s volcanic eruptions by ignoring them—a strategy that Vincent’s father had used. But that only made them worse. The repeated explosions left the house charged with tension. The silences between them weighed so heavily that visitors like the postman Roulin felt an air of dread even during their truces. Like Maupassant’s haunted hero, Vincent seemed at war with himself: seized by titanic passions one minute, brooding or nervous the next. “Horrible fits of anxiety” alternated with “feelings of emptiness and fatigue,” he later admitted. Days of exhausting argument were followed by nights of wandering sleeplessness.

Gauguin noted the “contradictions” in Vincent’s behavior and saw them as signs of a fierce inner struggle. “Vincent has been turning very strange,” he reported to Bernard, “but fighting it.” Years later, Gauguin recalled how suddenly and violently Vincent could change personalities: from “excessively abrupt and boisterous” to ominously silent, then back again. One minute he cogently made the case why Gauguin should stay in Arles and fondly laid plans for a joint exhibition; the next he angrily accused his guest of scheming mischief and hovered suspiciously after Gauguin went to bed, as if fearing a midnight flight. In a fit of mistrust, he seized the
bonze
self-portrait that he had given Gauguin as an invitation to the Midi and rubbed out the dedication (
“à mon ami”
) with paint solvent.

Of all the paranoid visions that filled Vincent’s head, one terrified him more than any other. Since Gauguin’s arrival in Arles, his relations with Theo had
changed. Their letters had grown not only shorter and less frequent, but less intimate as well. Theo had warmer words for the two young Dutch artists who were visiting him in Paris than for his distant, troubled brother. (He commented pointedly on how their “pleasant company” had improved life on the rue Lepic.) When the two artists left Paris for the countryside, Theo did not recommend they go to Arles, as Vincent had urged him to do.

It was only one of many signs that Theo’s confidence in his brother’s artistic project had begun to ebb. He seemed genuinely startled when Gauguin finally showed up in Arles—as if he doubted the combination’s success all along. After Gauguin arrived, he abandoned the long and rancorous push for Vincent to make salable works, a push that had defined their relationship for almost a decade. Instead, he sent only patronizing assurances (“the condition I want you to arrive at is that you should never have any worries”) and empty blandishments (“you are living like the great ones of the earth”), all signaling, it seemed, his acceptance of inevitable failure. “We must see to it that we don’t take too much on our shoulders,” he wrote, oddly unbothered by Vincent’s plan not to send any paintings for a year. “We shall be able to go on for some time to come, even without selling anything.”

For Gauguin, on the other hand, Theo saw only the brightest future. In letters filled with optimism and accolades, he sent news of Gauguin’s
“grand succès”
in Paris and reports of more sales. He boldly predicted that Gauguin’s reputation would be “bigger than anybody had thought”—bigger even than Monet’s. He praised Gauguin’s work not just for its salability but for its “strange poetry.” “Gauguin whispers words of solace for those who are not happy or healthy,” he wrote, usurping the language of consolation that Vincent had taught him. “In him nature itself speaks.” But of all the flattery Theo heaped on Gauguin, none could have rankled his brother more than this: “He could go the same way as Millet.”

Gauguin responded in kind, sending frequent, often long letters (in stark contrast to Vincent’s) filled with upbeat reports, courtly gestures, cogent explanations of Symbolist theory, and incisive business suggestions. Where Vincent sent no paintings to Paris, Gauguin sent multiple shipments, complete with directions for framing and selling. In one of these batches, he included his mocking portrait of Vincent painting sunflowers, which he grandly presented to Theo as a gift. Theo hailed it as “a great work of art” and called it the “best portrait” ever painted of his brother “in terms of capturing his inner being.”

Week after week of lopsided encomiums and unshared letters only intensified the sibling rivalry that had built up through the spring and summer. In the hothouse of paranoia on the place Lamartine, Vincent’s early suspicions that Gauguin was “a schemer” with political designs on his brother slipped easily into delusions of betrayal. Why, for instance, had Vincent’s relations with
Bernard come to such an abrupt, mysterious end shortly after his houseguest’s arrival in Arles? Bernard continued to correspond with Gauguin, but Vincent’s letters went strangely unanswered. Would his relations with Theo suffer the same fate? Was Gauguin another Tersteeg: another false brother luring Theo toward the
fata morgana
of conventional comfort and success?

Vincent had welcomed Gauguin as a lost sibling, like Bruyas. Had he unwittingly invited into their lives a stranger who, like Musset’s “wretch,”
looked
like a brother but brought only despair and ruin? In his attacks of inexplicable dread, every fear seemed plausible. For the first time, he started hoarding Theo’s letters—as if clinging to something that he felt slipping away—and eavesdropped suspiciously on Gauguin’s correspondence with Paris. Between Theo’s upcoming Christmas trip to Holland, which inevitably included a visit with the invidious Tersteeg, and his blithe acceptance of Gauguin’s invitation to Arles after years of resisting his brother’s entreaties, Vincent could see the outlines of treachery. If Theo would come to the Yellow House for Gauguin, would he abandon it if Gauguin left?

Nothing made Vincent feel more disconnected from his family, whether real or imagined, than the coming of Christmas. Like Redlaw in
The Haunted Man
, Dickens’s tale about a Christmas Eve reckoning with a phantom twin (a story that he reread every year), Vincent found nothing but dreaded reflection and regret in the joyful rituals of the season—a season that enveloped Arles starting in early December. Everywhere he turned, he saw plates of
“Sainte Barbe
corn” on windowsills—one of many local holiday customs that mixed Catholic mysticism with older pagan fertility rites. Soon, meat disappeared from meals and menus, special breads appeared, and desserts multiplied. Decorations of fruit and flowers filled the faded, dusty rooms throughout town—even the infernal Café de la Gare.

Then the crèches came out. Every family and business in Arles rehearsed the miraculous birth in little clay figurines, called
santons
, for which the Midi was famous. The same scene came to life and burst into song in the
pastorales
staged at the Folies Arlésiennes. These elaborate theatricals—part medieval mystery play, part musical revue—drew thousands to the theater, just as the parade of shepherds playing rustic instruments and leading a spotless lamb drew thousands into the streets, kneeling and crossing themselves as the sacred procession passed.

No matter the pageantry and piety outside his window, Vincent’s Christmas could never escape the ghost of the man who had presided over all his Christmases past. The Nativity festival that Arlesians called Calendo was a time to celebrate family—both living and departed. Only the poorest, homeless wretches spent the holiday alone. But in his agitated state, Vincent needed no special prompting to conjure his disapproving father. In the weeks before Christmas, he
spun yet another illusory plan to reverse the judgments of the past. Once again, it involved the approval of his nemesis H. G. Tersteeg, the only man who still carried the torch of the
rayon noir
. Raising the stakes at the Yellow House even higher, Vincent imagined using Gauguin’s recent successes to recruit Tersteeg’s support for a joint exhibition in London. Thus, in a single stroke, he could placate the implacable
gérant and
put to rest his spectral holiday visitor.

But fantasies of redemption were not enough. In the week before Christmas, tortured by Gauguin’s success and his own continued failure, terrified that Gauguin might leave and Theo might abandon him at any moment, and besieged by the usual demons of the season, Vincent withdrew to his studio in search of consolation. Over the next few days, an image took shape on his easel that had been gestating in his imagination since the previous summer: Madame Roulin and her infant Marcelle.

Since his own childhood of babies and cradles in a crowded parsonage, Vincent had been transfixed by the eternal tableau of mother and child—what Michelet called “the absolute of beauty and goodness, the acme of perfection.” In the apartment that he shared with Sien Hoornik, he fawned over his make-believe children and was overtaken with emotion at the sight of Sien bending over the cradle—an image that he rendered again and again. Whether contemplating a favorite print, describing a visit with Kee Vos and her son, or painting a domestic scene in Paris, the image of mother and child invariably caused his “eyes to grow moist” and his “heart to melt.” When he moved into the Yellow House in September, he planned to decorate his sturdy bedstead with the image of “a child in a cradle.”

In the five months since Marcelle’s birth, Vincent had painted the matronly Augustine several times—with and without her baby. When the photograph of his own mother arrived in September, his ambition redoubled. By mid-December, he had painted the postman’s wife so many times that her patience for the strange painter from the North had apparently reached its limit: Vincent had to launch his latest attempt by tracing one of his previous portraits.

Layering his own family longings onto the ubiquitous image of the Holy Family—especially the Virgin and Child that gazed beatifically from every shrine and festival and fireside crèche in Provence—he filled a big canvas with the most consoling image he could imagine. “As one whom his Mother comforteth,” he had written from England in 1876, at another moment of existential dread, “so I will comfort you, saith the Lord.” In Isleworth, he had poured his heartbreak not into art, but into sermons (“the journey of our life goes from the loving breast of our Mother on earth to the arms of our Father in heaven”) and into thousands of lines of poetry carefully transcribed into the guestbook of Annie Slade-Jones, another paragon of maternal fecundity and comfort. In 1882, abandoned by family and friends, he had dreamed a reverie of Sien and her newborn as “that
eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable … a light in the darkness, a brightness in the middle of a dark night.”

Just as he had turned Patience Escalier into a rustic saint, and himself into a
bonze
priest, he slowly transformed the coarse, harried postman’s wife into an icon of motherhood. The great mountain of her bosom he rendered in flowing curves and full, fruitlike ripeness. He clothed her in a simple buttoned bodice, not the flimsy, wrinkled frock of previous portraits. He raised her forehead to match the Virgins of his memory, and slimmed her formidable jowls and prominent chin to a maidenly point. He transformed her lips from the raw flesh of previous attempts to a bright ruby red and made her eyes sparkle with irises of a sublime, otherworldly green. Her hair, before always loosely swept up and tousled by labor, now formed into a crown of braids, as perfect as a porcelain figurine.

He filled this Daumier cartoon of indomitable provincial maternity with the most consoling palette he could devise—“a lullaby of colors,” he called it: for the bodice, a deep and somber green accented at the cuffs and collar with the tenderest baby blue; the broad, high-waisted skirt, light green against the earth-red chair and vermilion floor—a graduated scale of contrasts calculated to soothe the eye, not jolt it. “As an impressionist arrangement of colors,” he wrote, “I have never devised anything better.” For the face, he worked and reworked yellows and pinks to give her countenance light and life, and he crowned her with a halo of orange and yellow hair—like his own—the shining Delacroix nimbus that marked all his attempts to render the ultimate consolation of Christ.