by Betsy Draine
The earliest written mention of the shooting appeared in a letter by the painter Émile Bernard, who came to Auvers to attend Vincent’s funeral. In his letter, written two days after the funeral, Bernard stated that the innkeeper Ravoux told him that Van Gogh “placed his easel against a haystack and went behind the château to shoot himself with a revolver” (quoted in Rohan 88). However, Ravoux left no firsthand account of his recollections.
The narrative accepted by previous biographers is based largely on several accounts provided by Ravoux’s daughter, Adeline. In one version, she claimed that her father had loaned Vincent his pistol to ward off crows in the wheat field where he was painting, and it was there that the artist shot himself. However, as Naifeh and Smith argue, her tale contains inconsistencies, if not fabrications. It was popularly believed that Vincent’s last painting was Wheat Field with Crows, and Adeline probably adjusted her recollection to fit the romantic myth. (It is now thought that Vincent painted that work several weeks earlier.) Adeline’s accounts, many years after the fact, are based on her recollections of what her father told her and are thus hearsay. Each time she retold the story, she elaborated and added dialogue that she couldn’t possibly have overheard.
One discrepancy in her account is the detail she related of Vincent searching in the dark for his pistol. Paul Gachet fils recalled that it was still light out at about 9:00 p.m., when his father was summoned to Vincent’s bedside (Gachet 247). In France in midsummer, the days are long. If Vincent dropped the revolver after shooting himself, and it was still light out when he regained consciousness, why couldn’t he find it?
Naifeh and Smith offer a dramatically different explanation of what happened that day. According to their reconstruction of events, the shooting occurred not in a wheat field but in a different part of town, in a farmyard just off the main thoroughfare leading to the hamlet of Chaponval, near a dunghill or haystack in a courtyard. Their conclusion is based on comments made by two townswomen, Madame Liberge and Madame Baize, although those accounts are based on hearsay as well. The first woman reported what her father had told her years before, and the second what her grandfather told her.
Naifeh and Smith argue that it would have been easier for a wounded Vincent to return to the inn from the farmyard location than from the wheat field, which presented more difficult terrain to traverse. But the chief import of the location is that it fits their reconstruction of an accidental shooting by teenage boys, because it puts Vincent on a road leading to the boys’ favorite fishing hole and riverside tavern, where an encounter would have been likely.
In their biography, the authors do not mention that Paul Gachet fils, who was an amateur painter, later painted a view “from the Spot Where Vincent Committed Suicide” (reproduced in Distel and Stein 149; discussed in Rohan 58–59). Gachet’s 1904 painting shows a road in town with a low wall marking a courtyard with haystacks on the viewer’s left, a wall enclosing the grounds of the town’s château on the viewer’s right, and several houses with thatched roofs straight ahead. The site, while in town, is within sight of a wheat field and not far from the cemetery.
This location might well account for the conflicting rumors at the time: one mentioning a site in a farmer’s yard, the other asserting a wheat field in the vicinity of the cemetery. Today the town of Auvers has a plaque on the wall near the road indicated in Gachet’s painting marking the probable spot where Vincent shot himself.
The question, of course, is how Paul Gachet fils knew or thought he knew where the shooting took place. Was he a witness? Did Paul Gachet know René Secrétan? They were both the same age (sixteen), both had a connection to Vincent, and Auvers was a small town (population under three thousand in the 1890s). Yet Gachet states he never knew René Secrétan or his brother, Gaston: “As to the Secrétan brothers, we never saw them” (Gachet 192).
How important is the question of the site? After all, where the shooting took place doesn’t tell us who did the shooting. However, a farmyard or field just a few steps from the main road does raise the question of why Vincent would have chosen such a public place to end his life. A lonely wheat field far from town would have been more isolated. The farmyard site makes it less likely that he intended to commit suicide that day. So does the fact that he carried his easel and painting equipment along with him. Why encumber himself if he planned to commit suicide? These various circumstances, in addition to the absence of a suicide note, suggest either an accident or an unpremeditated act, a spur of the moment decision. But do they suggest a murder?
The strongest evidence that others might have been involved is that the gun, the easel, and Vincent’s painting equipment were never found, suggesting that someone “cleaned up” the scene afterward. The police who investigated the death searched for a discarded gun in the location indicated by Vincent but found nothing. In 2012 Alain Rohan published a short book claiming that an old revolver matching the description of the gun used by Vincent may have been the one found in the 1950s by a farmer in a field not far from the site painted by Gachet (Vincent van Gogh: Aurait-on retrouvé l’arme du suicide?). But there’s no conclusive proof that this gun was the weapon in question. And suppose it were; what of Vincent’s other gear? It may have been hard to find a pistol in a field blooming with vegetation, but an easel?
And what of Vincent’s evasive statements at the time? Naifeh and Smith maintain that Vincent was vague about what happened. When he staggered back to the inn, he said, “I wounded myself.” In reply to the question posed by a policeman, “Did you want to commit suicide?” he answered: “Yes, I believe so.” He added: “Do not accuse anyone, it is I who wanted to kill myself.” The police may have doubted whether he acted alone. Why else, the authors ask, would Vincent have made the comment? (Naifeh and Smith 850–51). However, the source for these quotations is the same Adeline Ravoux whom the authors dismiss elsewhere as unreliable. “She often added dialogue to enhance the drama of her stories, sometimes conjuring whole scenes” (879). If the police ever filed a report on the incident, it has long since disappeared (Rohan 106–11).
Therefore, the freight of the argument rests almost entirely on Naifeh and Smith’s interpretation of René Secrétan’s recollections. They believe René stepped forth when he did because he was burdened with guilt. They point out that the shot that killed Van Gogh was fired from René’s gun (according to his own account), and they assume that he and his friends “cleaned up” the crime scene to remove any incriminating evidence. They argue that the surest sign of his guilt is that Secrétan’s father, a wealthy Parisian who summered with his family in Auvers, “spirited” the brothers out of town right after the shooting. Such a move would certainly seem incriminating.
It is problematic that in their otherwise well-documented book (the authors amassed five thousand typewritten pages of notes, which they published separately on a website: www.vangoghbiography.com), Naifeh and Smith provide no footnote to support the claim that René was “spirited away with his brother Gaston after the shooting by their pharmacist father in the middle of the summer” (Naifeh and Smith 855). In fact, René told Doiteau that he and his family left Auvers before the shooting, not after it, “around the middle of July” (Doiteau 48). The shooting occurred on July 27. Such was the family’s usual summer practice, he added. According to René, “during July, with my hunting and fishing gear, we used to fly off to Granville, where we had a villa” (Doiteau 47–49). Bastille Day is celebrated on July 14. Like the Fourth of July weekend in the United States, it marks the launch of many summer vacations in France. Therefore, there was nothing inherently suspicious about the family leaving town at that time, certainly nothing to support the insinuation that the father interrupted the boys’ vacation and hastily sent them away to protect them.
Obviously, if René Secrétan had already left Auvers before the shooting, the case against him falls apart. Therefore, it becomes crucial for Naifeh and Smith to challenge his testimony on this all-important issue. To do so, they po
int to René’s evasiveness in the interview as to his departure date. First, they question his explanation of how and when Vincent stole the revolver from him; and second, they argue that René seems vague on when he learned about the shooting. To discredit his claim that he left for Normandy in mid-July, the authors write that René “implied that Vincent had stolen the pistol from him on the very day of the shooting, placing himself still in Auvers at the time” (876).
However, there is no basis for that charge. Here are René’s words, followed by our translation:
Nous laissons sur place tout notre barda de pécheurs, musette, etc . . . , et même nos blouses. C’est dans ce barda que se trouvait cette vielle pétoire et c’est certainement là que Van Gogh l’a trouvée et l’a prise. Elle appartenait à Ravoux et je crois qu’il l’a mettait dans son tiroir. C’etait un vieux pistolet tirant le caliber 380 qui partait quand il avait le temps car il était démantibulé et le sort a voulu que le jour où Van Gogh s’en servit, il ait fonctionné. (Doiteau 46)
[We used to leave our fishing kit, socks, and even overalls there [on shore]. The old gun was in this kit, and that’s certainly where Van Gogh found it and took it. It belonged to Ravoux and I believe he put it in his drawer. It was an old .038 caliber pistol [9mm] that went off when it felt like it because it was falling apart, but as fate would have it, on the day Van Gogh used it, it worked.]
René never implies that Vincent may have stolen the pistol from him “on the very day of the shooting.” What he says is that on the day Vincent used the gun, it worked, not that it worked on the day he took it. He adds that he believes Vincent put the gun in his drawer, indicating that a period of time elapsed between its theft and its use. More to the point, nothing René says in his interview places him in Auvers on the day of the shooting, as any defense lawyer might argue.
What of René’s vacillation on the question of when he first learned of Van Gogh’s death? He told Doiteau that he may have learned about it when the family returned to Auvers at the end of their vacation, or he may have read about it before then in a Paris newspaper. Naifeh and Smith point out correctly that his memory seems sharp on all other points, which makes this lapse suspicious. Moreover, they claim there was no such story in any of the Paris newspapers. And yet an article on Van Gogh’s death did appear in La Petite Presse, a Parisian newspaper, on August 18, 1890 (Rohan 90). That could have been the article René saw. Furthermore, if René had been implicated in the shooting, would his father have brought the family back to Auvers at the end of that summer? That seems unlikely. In any case, René’s uncertainty as to when he learned of the shooting is a dubious platform on which to build an indictment for manslaughter.
The main thrust of the authors’ argument—that René Secrétan was easing his conscience by offering a disguised confession when he spoke to Doiteau—is open to debate. There are moments in the interview when René’s self-revelations appear self-satisfied and even smug. Secrétan looks back on his teenage years with amusement. He pokes fun at himself as a callow youth interested only in girls, guns, and fishing, and acknowledges that he was the “head dunce” in his lycée (Doiteau 39). He boasts about his amours. He jokes about Vincent’s scruffy clothes and smirks about the time they caught him masturbating in the woods. For a confession, the tone is off.
It may not be necessary to look for a hidden motive to explain why Secrétan came forward in 1956 to reminisce about Van Gogh. That was the year the movie Lust for Life appeared, the film version of Irving Stone’s biography of Van Gogh, with Kirk Douglas in the starring role. Secrétan said it was the movie that had stirred his memories and prompted him to set the record straight. In his conversation with Doiteau he complains about all the details the film got wrong. He takes issue with the physical appearance of the actor Kirk Douglas, the costumes, and other matters. Doiteau reveals that René Secrétan also knew Toulouse-Lautrec and had similar complaints to make about the accuracy of the 1952 film Moulin Rouge. He may not have cared much about art, but René was a fan of the movies.
At the end of his interview with Doiteau, René, who was eighty-three, sensing that the end of his life was near, offered the following summation: “In any case, I’ll be able to say as I go out that I had the most beautiful life that a man of my generation could have wished for. All the friends of my youth are dead, and I’m the last ninepin to fall. Amen” (Doiteau 58). That doesn’t sound like a man with a guilty conscience.
We might also question the notion that Vincent played the martyr by refusing to implicate René Secrétan in his death (Naifeh and Smith 875). Why would Van Gogh have protected an annoying teenager who tormented him? All his life Vincent was quick to attack others and to accuse them of harming his interests (even, on occasion, his loving brother and patron, Theo). How likely is it that he would lie to protect a boy who had done nothing all summer but make him miserable? He might have been willing to protect Gaston, René’s brother and his one friend in Auvers, or some other boy who had been kind to him, but surely not René.
Van Gogh shared every intimate detail of his thoughts and feelings with Theo, and according to all accounts, the brothers had time to converse in Dutch for several hours before Vincent died. Vincent might have lied to the police about the shooting, but wouldn’t he have told Theo the truth? Yet Theo never gave any indication that he thought his brother’s death was anything other than a suicide. “Poor Fellow. . . . He was lonely, and sometimes it was more than he could bear,” wrote Theo (Naifeh and Smith 857). Moreover, if several boys had been involved in the affair, wouldn’t one have talked over the course of fifty years, after Vincent became famous?
The same holds true for the townspeople, if we are to believe there was a conspiracy of silence to protect the boys. Naifeh and Smith suggest that possibility. As evidence they cite remarks made by the respected art historian John Rewald, who interviewed surviving townspeople in the 1930s and reported hearing a rumor that some boys had shot Vincent accidentally and, fearing punishment, had never come forward. To protect them, Vincent played the martyr (Naifeh and Smith 856, 879). Rewald never expressed an opinion in print on the matter, perhaps because he had no way to confirm what he had heard.
Can forensic evidence resolve the question? What is known about the wound, the angle of the shot, and the distance from the body? Naifeh and Smith argue that the facts about the gunshot wound support an interpretation that the shot was fired from a distance. But Rohan cites medical analysis using Dr. Gachet’s description of the wound, showing it as perfectly consistent with a small caliber gun fired from close range—perhaps two or three centimeters from the body, as in the case of suicide (Rohan 79). Two recent critics of Naifeh and Smith accept Rohan’s opinion (Van Tilbrough and Meedendorp 459). Naifeh and Smith reply that their version of the ballistic evidence is supported by a leading expert on handguns, Dr. Vincent Di Miao, who doubts that the wound was self-inflicted based on the bullet’s trajectory (Naifeh and Smith). These dueling interpretations rely not on new evidence but on what observers reported (or failed to report) at the time.
The most baffling question remains: what became of the easel, Vincent’s painting gear, sketchbooks, and the canvas he took with him on the day of the shooting? During that summer he was working at a fevered pitch and often finished a painting in a single day. What happened to Vincent’s last work, whether completed or uncompleted? For that matter, what became of the six paintings René says Vincent made for the boys earlier that summer? He even describes them by subject (indeed, a remarkable feat of memory). According to René, the subjects were:
“Road leading up from the station with a woman in the background wearing a red apron.”
“Path and a bend in the riverbank next to père Martin’s bar. (This bar would have been destroyed during the war of 1914–18.)”
“Myself, the terror of the smoked herrings, as Vincent called me, fishing but bearing no resemblance to me other than the color of my clothes, a red jacket and white trousers.”
�
��Two fishermen in a boat seen from behind and from the opposite path.”
“A green pathway going down to the river.”
“A study of my nymph [girlfriend] at the time. I wasn’t jealous.” (Doiteau 42–43.)
Doiteau speculates that the brothers’ father threw these paintings away because he didn’t think much of Gaston’s wish to become an artist. (As it turned out, Gaston became a cabaret singer.) In any case, no paintings matching these descriptions have survived.
Finally, who else besides Gaston was part of René’s gang? He mentions one other boy by name who used to astonish Vincent with magic tricks. There are suggestions of a larger group of boys up from Paris on their summer vacation, and it would be interesting to know who they were and what they might have remembered about the events surrounding Vincent’s death.
As we mulled over these conflicting arguments, we began to construct a backstory for our novel that would be consistent with the following facts:
In the months leading up to the shooting, Vincent was friendly with a group of boys who taunted him, one of whom, René Secrétan, had a gun.
The gun used in the shooting was probably the one René had been playing with all summer.
René claimed that he and his family had left Auvers before the shooting, and there is no reason to question his alibi.
The bullet was fired at close or fairly close range; there are disputes as to distance and trajectory.
After the shooting, someone—a person or persons unknown—collected Vincent’s painting paraphernalia, including the painting he was working on, no trace of which has ever been found.
We used these facts as guidelines and relied on our imagination to fill in the gaps. As Naifeh and Smith have shown, there may be reason to suspect that someone other than Vincent was involved in the shooting. But we decided it would be wrong to repeat an unsubstantiated charge against an actual person. So we invented a fictional character to take the place of René Secrétan.