Van Gogh (78 page)

M
ARGOT
B
EGEMANN
(
Illustration credit 22.1
)

Sometime that summer, the advantages of a liaison entered his thoughts. Margot was not just the youngest Begemann sister, she was a part owner of the family business, having used her own legacy to rescue her brother Louis from bankruptcy in 1879. Vincent’s family was struggling financially, with medical bills to pay and daughters to dower. In July, his youngest brother Cor, now seventeen, had to withdraw from school and take a job at another nearby factory owned by the Begemann family. At about the same time, Vincent began to encourage Margot’s affections with gifts of books and flowers and, of course, his own art. They hid their relationship from both their families (although Dorus
suspected something). Both would have disapproved: the Begemanns for fear of Vincent’s ultimate intentions; the Van Goghs for fear of the inevitable embarrassment.

Even with such dim prospects, Vincent plunged ahead. “The man of faith, of energy, of warmth … will not be put off so easily,” he wrote Theo, quoting Octave Mouret. “He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, he ‘defiles.’ ” Vincent would later describe the months of his clandestine courtship in terms taken directly from Mouret’s manual. He was merely
“disturbing the tranquility of a woman,”
he insisted; “hurling [her] back into life, into love.” He compared Margot to “a Cremona violin that has been spoiled by bad, bungling repairers”—“a rare specimen of great value” that was “rather too damaged,” but could still be played upon. Vincent may not have wooed Margot for her money, as Mouret would have done; but her money, like her wounded spinsterhood, no doubt played a role in his Mouret fantasy of advantageous conquest. “I had her in my power,” he boasted.

Unlike Zola’s cad, however, Vincent had no experience with the power of being loved. While he clung blithely to his fantasy, the relationship rushed toward inevitable catastrophe. On their long walks, Margot would confide, “I too have loved at last,” and profess her readiness to die for him. But Vincent “never paid any attention,” he later admitted. Not until mid-September did her pleading vows of love unto death and other unspecified “symptoms” begin to unsettle him. Fearing that she might be developing “brain fever,” he consulted a doctor and quietly alerted her brother Louis.

But the warnings didn’t alter the image of amorous daring in his head. Only a day or two later, he maneuvered himself onto a sofa with Margot when her sisters were out of the house. A niece, come to pick blackberries in the garden, saw them together and reported their shocking intimacy to her mother. The alarm sounded throughout the Begemann clan, according to the niece’s later account. “That degenerate son of the minister” who “fancies himself a painter” and “is always broke” had compromised Margot’s maidenhood and “sullied the good name of the family Begemann.” Vincent and Margot were immediately summoned to a Begemann family council, where the sisters excoriated Margot for her indiscretion and mocked her protestations of love. Vincent listened with rising fury until he finally exploded. “I will marry her,” he announced, pounding the table, “I want to marry her. I
must
marry her.”

The assembled Begemanns took his surprise proposal as a confession that Margot was pregnant. The council erupted in reproach. One of the sisters leaped into Vincent’s face and screamed “Cad!” Marriage was unthinkable. Margot was too old, they insisted: too old to marry, too old to bear children, too old to be so foolish. She must be sent away immediately. To avoid scandal, a friendly, discreet doctor must be found to take her in and deal with the consequences of her
indiscretion, whatever they might be. Vincent protested mightily, according to his later account, defending his actions and Margot’s honor, denouncing the charges against them as
“groundless and malicious.”
“I gave as good as I got,” he claimed. He repeated his proposal of marriage, only this time as an angry ultimatum: “It has to be now or not at all.”

But nothing he said could reverse his banishment, or hers. A few days later, on the eve of her departure for Utrecht, Margot met Vincent in a field on the outskirts of town—a furtive and surely forbidden final encounter. In a letter to Theo, Vincent described what happened next. It was his very first mention of Margot Begemann:

Like Madame Bovary, she had taken strychnine. But not enough to kill her. Vincent forced her to vomit and rushed her to a doctor in Eindhoven, who administered an antidote. Family honor immediately closed over the incident and Margot left for Utrecht amid private opprobrium and public suspicion. It was given out that she had “gone abroad.”

The “terrible” events of September poisoned Vincent’s fantasy of
la joie de vivre
. In a flurry of letters, he tried desperately to save it. He decried Margot’s mistreatment at the hands of her family, heaping special blame on her sisters for their false accusations that drove
“so many nails into the patient’s coffin.”
He broadened his indictment to include all “respectable people” with their bourgeois small-mindedness and their “damnable icy cold” religion. “They are perfectly
absurd,”
he fulminated, “making society a kind of lunatic asylum, a perfectly topsy-turvy world.” He even invoked the Revolution’s call for “a change in the social position of women … with equal rights, equal freedom.”

But at the same time he invoked his special rights as a partisan of Octave Mouret to “break the stagnation” of women, and continued to maintain that he had done Margot a favor by rescuing her from the melancholy of a loveless life. (“She had never really loved before,” he explained.) His own actions may have been impulsive, even foolish, he said, but they were at least
manly actions
. “Aren’t those who never do anything foolish,” he challenged, “even more foolish in my eyes than I am in theirs?”

Unlike Mouret, Vincent insisted that he really did love Margot. “I believe without question,” he declared, “that she loves me [and] I love her.” But in his belated protestations, as in all his claims of injury and injustice, one can hear
Vincent fending off the persistent inner voice of self-reproach. He steadfastly withheld the details of his involvement from his parents, and ordered Theo to do the same. He invented elaborate deceptions to hide the full, humiliating truth from his brother. Instead of admitting that the Begemann family had roundly rejected his proposal, he led Theo to believe that marriage remained a viable option, dependent only on Margot’s health and the permission of her doctor—a sad echo of his earlier claim that Sien’s doctor had “prescribed” marriage. And while he vehemently proclaimed his love and defended the propriety of his actions to his brother, he never said a word about Margot to Anthon van Rappard. Reporting on a trip to Utrecht in late September, Vincent told Theo that he spent “almost the whole day with [Margot].” But to Rappard he claimed that he spent the day shopping for prints.

By the beginning of October, Vincent had arranged for Rappard to visit Nuenen again later that month, and Margot Begemann’s name had virtually disappeared from his letters.

But not even Vincent’s stoutest denials could stop the events of September from resonating backward through the pains and failures of the past. “Domestic happiness,” he wrote Theo bitterly, “is a beautiful promise society makes, but doesn’t keep.” His furious arguments could put off the guilt he felt over Margot’s “sad story” for a time, at least (it would resurface at the end of his life), but they could not protect him from fear. In Vincent’s relentless dissection of Margot’s “critical nerve disease”—her “neuritis,” her “encephalitis,” her “melancholia,” her “religious mania”—he was already exploring the dark place into which he felt himself slipping. “There are things in the depths of our souls,” he confessed in a moment of introspection unknown to Octave Mouret, “that would cut us to the quick if we knew about them.”

BY THE TIME
he arrived in mid-October, Rappard must barely have recognized his hale companion of the previous spring. Vincent stood on the platform of the Eindhoven train station pale and gaunt as a ghost. He had not slept a full night or eaten a full meal in a month. He complained of weakness, melancholy, and “anguish.” “There are many days when I am almost paralyzed,” he wrote. Vincent’s parents, who had lobbied for Rappard’s visit in hopes of providing their “feverish” son with some distraction, may have written him in advance, as they wrote Theo, preparing him for what to expect. “We have had difficult days again with Vincent.… He is very irritable and over-excited … sad and unhappy.” Melancholy had led to drink and drink had led to “violence,” Dorus warned. “There is a question whether we can go on living together.”

Forewarned or not, Rappard yielded to yet another campaign of invitation, this one even more frantic than the last. It had begun the day his previous visit
ended and continued through the summer with exchanges of books, declarations of solidarity, and promises of models. Vincent painted version after version of the painting he had seen in Rappard’s studio in December, of a woman spinning, and advertised them to his friend. The tone of desperation was set early, in August, when Vincent scolded Rappard for his desultory correspondence. The next month, the two scuffled over Vincent’s intrusive artistic advice. “Remember,
I
am making the painting, not you!” Rappard wrote, in a rare show of spleen that sent Vincent into a fit of defensiveness. Rappard had no idea why Vincent’s pleas for him to visit reached a new pitch of intensity in late September.

They spent the cool days just as they always had, making long excursions into the countryside, knocking on doors and “discovering new models.” They visited Vincent’s art lover, Hermans, so Vincent could show off his lone commission. They sketched and painted outside when they could (“there are splendid autumn effects”), but they also spent many hours in the Kerkstraat studio, where Rappard busied himself at his easel (“he is up to his ears in work,” Vincent reported to Theo) while Vincent basked in rare companionship and fantasized that Rappard would be the first of many artists to visit his Brabant studio.

But nothing was the same as before. In the previous six months, Rappard’s
Old Woman at the Spinning Wheel
had been awarded a silver medal at the International and Universal Exhibition in London, and another of his works had been shown at the National Exhibition in Utrecht. “[He] is doing very well,” Vincent acknowledged to Theo, comparing his friend’s work to Courbet’s. “It is damned well done.” Rappard had journeyed to Drenthe again and returned, not in disgrace and despair, but with “a good crop of studies.” As if to remind Vincent of their diverging paths, Rappard insisted they take a trip to Heeze, a small town southeast of Eindhoven, to visit a friend from Utrecht, Willem Wenckebach, another dapper artist-aristocrat, fellow medal winner, and Rappard’s regular companion on sketching trips. Afterward, Vincent muttered to one of his students, “I do not like these highborn people.”

It was inevitable that they fought. After almost two weeks of short days and claustrophobic nights, Rappard bristled at Vincent’s bullying criticism and complained about his “manner of working”—an accusation that could have embraced everything from his crude technique to his unconventional work habits to his rough treatment of models, but surely rang with class distinction and disapproval. At some point, they may both have realized that this was the last time they would see each other.

After the stinging rebuke from the Begemanns, Rappard’s withdrawal—and his successes—combined to loose the demons of guilt and self-reproach that Vincent had kept at bay with visions of
la joie de vivre
. When he finally lashed out, he chose as his target not his guileless friend, or even his distant brother,
but the original source of all his grief and pain. At a family dinner, with Rappard looking on in horror, Vincent provoked a fierce argument with his father. “Suddenly the son got so furious,” Rappard recorded in a rare surviving account of his time with Vincent, “that he rose from his place with the carving knife from the tray in his hand and threatened the bewildered old man.”

R
OM PARIS, THEO WATCHED HIS BROTHER’S LATEST UNRAVELING WITH
desperate dismay. Every letter from his parents brought hints of fresh outrages and new fears. “Vincent is very irritable … His actions are increasingly unaccountable.… He is sad and finds no peace … We hope for Higher Help.” Theo had seen the crisis coming the year before when he pleaded with Vincent to come to Paris from Drenthe rather than continue his torturous homeward trek. Even after Vincent arrived in Nuenen, Theo had done everything in his power to mediate with money and words an antipathy well beyond either’s reach. Despite a busy year at the gallery and even a trip to London in August, he had found time to make two visits to Nuenen that summer: twice the usual burden of oversight and worry. Now, despite his efforts, it had come to this: public scandal and reports of domestic violence.