They pretended to befriend him—bought him drinks, invited him on outings—only to make him the butt of pranks. They put salt in his coffee and a snake in his paint box. (He nearly fainted when he found the snake.) When they noticed his habit of sucking on a dry paintbrush, they distracted him long enough to rub the brush with hot red pepper, then watched with glee as his mouth exploded. “How we used to drive poor Toto wild,” one boy later boasted, using their patois pet name for the strange painter-man—yet another way of saying “crazy.”
The leader of the summer boys was René Secrétan, the sixteen-year-old son of a rich pharmacist from Paris. The Secrétans had a holiday house in the area and arrived every June at the start of the fishing season. An avid outdoorsman who would readily skip class at his prestigious lycée for a chance to go hunting or fishing, and who admired paintings only if they depicted naked women, René Secrétan might never have crossed Vincent van Gogh’s path if it had not been for his older brother Gaston, an aspiring artist. Nineteen-year-old Gaston—the sensitive, poetic polar opposite of his brother—found Vincent’s stories of the new art and the Paris art world engaging in a way unfathomable to René, who kept expecting the authorities to haul Vincent away any day “because of his hare-brained ideas and the way he lived.”
In his loneliness, Vincent accepted the abuse of the younger brother as the price of the older’s companionship. He nicknamed René “Buffalo Bill,” both for his strutting cowboy bravado and for the costume he had bought at Bill Cody’s “Wild West Show” at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, complete with boots, fringed coat, and cowboy hat. But Vincent mispronounced the name—he called him “Puffalo Pill”—a mistake that only incited René to more aggressive taunts and greater extremes of ridicule. For an extra touch of authenticity and menace, he added a revolver to his ensemble, an antiquated .380-caliber “peashooter” that “went off when it felt like it,” René recalled.
Although he agreed to pose at least once (fishing on the riverbank), René used his “chummy” proximity to Vincent primarily as a cover for more elaborate forms of mischief and provocation. “Our favorite game,” said René, “was making him angry, which was easy.” It was René, an athletic drinker, who bought the painter round after round of Pernod at the local poacher’s bar. It was René who, after discovering Vincent’s taste for the pornography that he and his friends traded in, paraded his Parisian girlfriends in the painter’s presence, fondling and kissing them to torment poor Toto, and encouraging the girls (some of them dancers from the Moulin Rouge) to tease and torment him by pretending to show amorous interest in him.
Head of a Boy with Broad-Brimmed Hat (probably René Secrétan), JUNE-JULY 1890, CHALK ON PAPER, 5⅜ × 3⅜ IN. (Illustration credit 42.4)
But no adolescent prank or sexual humiliation could wound Vincent as deeply as the letter that arrived from Paris at the beginning of July. In a cri de coeur unlike anything else in their long correspondence, Theo described the hell his life had become. The baby was sick—“continuously crying, day and night.” “We don’t know what to do,” he wrote, “and everything we do seems to aggravate his sufferings.” Jo was sick, too—sick with worry: so terrified that her child might die that she “moaned in her sleep.”
In all these woes, Theo saw one single cause: not enough money. “I work all day long but do not earn enough to protect that good Jo from worries over money matters,” he confessed. He blamed his employers of seventeen years—“those rats”—for paying him so little and treating him “as though I just entered their business.” But mostly he blamed himself. In the ultimate test of manhood—providing for his wife and child—he had failed miserably. The shame of it drove him, yet again, to the thought of quitting: of “taking the plunge” by setting up as an independent dealer. For the risk-averse Theo, it was tantamount to a threat of suicide.
In every cry of anguish, Vincent heard an accusation. When Theo listed Vincent among the mouths he had to feed, or portrayed himself as an exhausted draft horse pulling a heavy cart in which Vincent rode, or predicted “going through the world like a down-and-out beggar,” the Furies of guilt swept back into Vincent’s life with a vengeance. The entire letter cried out against the injustice of duty, familial and fraternal (“I spend nothing on extras and yet am short of money”). Theo even touched the most sensitive subject of all, his deteriorating health, with a teary wish that he might live to see his son “grow up to be Somebody”—unlike his failed father and dissolute uncle.
In this paroxysm of bitterness and despair, Theo could not let his brother’s pitiful delusions of family stand. “I hope from the bottom of my heart that you too will someday have a wife,” he wrote. Only by that route would Vincent ever truly “become a man” and know the crushing burdens, and joys, of fatherhood. Dismissing any claim of a higher, transcendent bond from the past (“the daisies and the lumps of earth freshly cast up by the plow,” he parodied), Theo affirmed his love for Jo as the sine qua non of his happiness and the true seed from which his family sprang. The message was clear enough: if Vincent wanted a family, he would have to make one of his own.
In Auvers, the letter struck a devastating blow. Both its substance and its tone filled Vincent with alarm. Jo may not have known the true nature of Theo’s illness, but Vincent certainly did, and he knew better than anyone the terrible toll it took on one’s wits and compass. He also saw how the plan to leave Goupil threatened his dream of a life together in Auvers. Without his job, without the entresol, Theo would need all the capital he could muster for his new venture as an independent dealer. There would be no money for a country retreat—no leisurely weekends, no long holidays.
At first, Vincent fought his instinct to catch the next train for Paris. “I should greatly like to come and see you,” he wrote Theo the day the letter arrived, “[but] I am afraid of increasing the confusion by coming immediately.” Instead, he sent another pleading invitation to the country—his most desperate yet—demanding “a full month at least” for the fresh air to have its full effect. He included sketches of his most alluring paintings and a delusional offer to trade places with Jo and the baby. They could have Vincent’s room at the Ravoux Inn and he would come to Paris, he assured Theo, “so that you should not be too much alone.”
But only days later, unable to wait, overcome by dread, and determined to “unmake” his brother’s disastrous decision, Vincent rushed to Paris. He arrived at Cité Pigalle unannounced and unexpected.
In his effort to undo a disaster, Vincent triggered a catastrophe.
The apartment was already primed for an eruption. In the five days since Theo had sent his troubled letter, the crises had only deepened. He had decided to confront his employers with an ultimatum: either they would give him a raise or he would resign. He had enjoyed some recent successes in selling, and Jo’s brother Andries had agreed to help him find financing for an independent dealership. The combination had made him bold enough to risk everything. The baby’s wails and Jo’s worries had made him desperate enough.
But the implacable Jo worried even more about the brinkmanship of an ultimatum. Would Theo endanger his young family by quitting his job and “recklessly going into the unknown”? How certain could he be of success as an independent dealer? What would they do if they found themselves “without a penny of income”? Vincent arrived to find the couple “distressed” and “overwrought” and locked in a bitter quarrel over a decision with the highest possible stakes—for Vincent as well as for them. “It was no slight thing when we all felt our daily bread was in danger,” he recalled the ongoing dispute, which he quickly joined. “We felt that our means of subsistence were fragile.” With Vincent’s vulnerability and volatility added to the mix, the arguments soon escalated. He later described them as “violent.”
When Andries Bonger arrived, the rancor turned in his direction. Vincent aggressively questioned his support for Theo’s proposed venture, especially in light of his reneging on a similar pledge in the past. He may even ha
ve called for Theo to “break” with his brother-in-law there and then. But mostly he zeroed in on what he saw as the greatest threat: Theo’s plan to move to the ground-floor apartment in the same building and share the garden with Andries and his wife. The move rejected all Vincent’s fervent pleas for a house in the country and repair in nature. With a garden outside their door, Theo and his family would have no need for the glories of Auvers that Vincent had argued so ardently in paint. He saw his dream of a reunion on the heath dying.
In the furor that followed, Vincent’s grievances against Jo as a negligent mother (for raising her baby in the city) and Jo’s resentment over the money Theo spent on his idle brother apparently found their way into bitter words. “If only I’d been a bit kinder to him when he was with us!” Jo later wrote. “How sorry I was for being impatient with him.” In one particularly acid exchange, brother and sister-in-law argued fiercely over the placement of a painting.
Vincent left the apartment, and Paris, the same day. He rushed off before a planned visit by an old acquaintance, Guillaumin. “The hours I shared with you were a bit too difficult and trying for us all,” he wrote afterward. He described his brief—and last—visit to Paris with a single word: “agony.”
So furious were the arguments that day that all the letters detailing the events of Sunday, July 6, were subsequently lost or destroyed. In their place, Jo later substituted a happy tale of a summer lunch and a parade of prominent visitors that left Vincent “overtired and excited”—the first (and only) sign of the terrible end three weeks later. But Vincent told a different story. He left Paris that day crushed in a different way. “I feared,” he wrote Theo afterward, “that being a burden to you, you felt me to be rather a thing to be dreaded.”
BACK IN AUVERS, Vincent’s world changed. Pursued by the “sadness” and “storms” of Paris, he saw threats everywhere. When he climbed the riverbank to the fields above, he found the picturesque vistas of rural life replaced by a dark void of unfeeling wilderness. All trace of consolation had drained from the landscape, along with the promise of second chances and redemption.
He lugged two of his awkward double-width canvases up the hillside to record this new, threatening vision of nature. Where before he had painted a rolling mosaic of countryside, now he painted “vast fields of wheat under troubled skies”—a featureless desert of grain as bare and lonely as the heath. Nothing—not a tree, not a house, not a steeple—breaks the impossibly distant horizon. A slight rise in the middle suggests less a hill than the curve of the earth. Instead of a crystal-blue sky or a radiant sunset, he painted an ominous darkness and a roil of thunderclouds in deeper and deeper shades of blue.
On the other canvas, he plunged directly into the churning wheat, following a rutted reaper’s lane to a fork in the middle of a field. Wind whips the ripe grain into heaving whirlpools of color and stroke—a lashing so violent that it frightens a coven of crows from their hiding place. They swoop and rise in a panic of escape from the remorselessness of nature. In both these ravishingly bleak vistas, he banished any view of rustic domesticity; not a person or a dwelling is visible for miles. Instead of advertising the consolations of country life, now he was using his brush, he said, “to express sadness and extreme loneliness.” “My life is threatened at the very root,” he wrote only days after returning to his former paradise. “My steps are wavering.”
On July 15, Theo took his family directly from Paris to Holland. Only the true country air of home, he decided, could revive his wife and child. They did not stop in Auvers on the way, as Theo had once offered to do. Jo and the baby would stay in Holland for a month. Theo left after a few days and returned to Paris by a roundabout route, stopping to do business in The Hague, Antwerp, and Brussels on his way; but not in Auvers. Vincent sent a wounded letter of protest, raising yet another alarm about the terrible events of July 6. In a mix of anguish and supplication (“Have I done something wrong?”), he unburdened his heart of its darkest fears: about his role in Theo’s “falling out” with Jo, about his continuing need for money at such a difficult time, about the “grave danger” that he saw everywhere.
Theo announced his departure for Holland on July 14, Bastille Day. Only days before, Vincent had received a letter from his mother and sister, delighted at the prospect of Theo’s imminent arrival with his wife and child. There would be a reunion on the heath after all. “I often think of you both,” he replied forlornly, “and should very much like to see you once again.” In response to his mother’s recommendation that, for his health’s sake, he should spend some time in a garden (“to see the flowers growing”), Vincent offered his darker, contrary view of nature: “I myself am quite absorbed in the immense plain with wheat fields against the hills, boundless as a sea.”
Theo could help his mother in the garden; Vincent was fated to wander the lonely heath. “Good-bye for today,” he wrote in his last words to his mother and sister. “I have to go out to work.”
He only had to step outside the door of the Ravoux Inn to find an image of loneliness and abandonment. Directly across the street, the Auvers town hall, the Mairie, was bedecked with flags and garlands and Chinese lanterns, ready for the annual Fête Nationale of fireworks and celebration that night. But until then the square was deserted; the bleachers empty. Vincent painted it that way—with no throngs, no brass band, no fireworks, no dancing. The town hall—a stone cube—sits stolidly alone, in shrubless isolation, hung mirthlessly for festivities in which it, and he, will not participate. It bears an unmistakable, ghostly resemblance to the town hall on the Zundert Markt, directly across from the parsonage of his childhood.
When Theo returned to his Paris apartment on July 18, he did not invite his brother to join him, as Vincent had once offered to do. For more than a week, he did not even write. When he finally did, it was only to dismiss Vincent’s worries with exclamations of incomprehension (“Where did you see these violent domestic quarrels?”), and dismiss as “a trifling matter” the stuff of his brother’s nightmares.
Vincent dared not ask—and Theo did not share—the predictable outcome of his confrontation at work. His bosses had ignored his ultimatum, refused his demand for a raise, and treated his threat to quit with indifference. Desperately lonely for his family (he wrote to Jo daily) and desolate over his own future—his career, his health—Theo considered cutting the cord with his inconsolable brother. But, as always, duty restrained him. “One cannot drop him when he’s working so hard and so well,” he wrote Jo with a cry of exasperation. “When will a happy time come for him?”
Vincent sent an order for paints, hoping no doubt that Theo would bring them himself to Auvers, a mere twenty miles away. Theo breezily advised his brother that if “there is something troubling you or not going right … drop in to see Dr. Gachet; he will give you something to make you feel better.” Vincent pleaded in hints for more information (“I hope you have found those worthy gentlemen well disposed toward you”) and left more drafts of letters unfinished and unsent. “There are many things I should like to write you about,” he wrote in one of them, “but I feel it useless.” Theo maintained his stony silence. It must have seemed to Vincent as if a continent separated them.
Nothing posed a greater threat to his stability—his sanity—than Theo’s withdrawal. Since his return from Paris, the events of that day had haunted his thoughts like horlas. Other fears beset him as well, especially Theo’s progressing illness—and his own. As the first anniversary of the terrible attack the previous summer in Saint-Rémy approached, another one seemed both inevitable and imminent. “I am risking my life,” he wrote in one of his discarded drafts, “and my reason has half foundered.” He complained of feeling “a certain horror” when he thought about the future. At times, he trembled with fear so violently that he had trouble writing, and could hardly hold a brush in his hand.
To steady his nerves, Vincent always had alcohol (whether Pernod at a poacher’s bar with young René Secrétan, or absinthe at a roadside
café with the local gendarme). But to chase the demons from his head, nothing beat the distraction of work. “I apply myself to my canvases with all my mind,” he wrote Theo. Dr. Gachet had recommended the same remedy. “He tells me that in my case work is the best thing to keep my balance … that I ought to throw myself into my work with all my strength.” The more the storms “weighed” on him, the more furiously Vincent applied paint to canvas. By the third week of July, he had begun a whole raft of new paintings, most of them on the vast double squares that had become the shape of his imagination. Only in an image this size could he lose himself—be swallowed up—in raptures of brushwork and eternities of looking.
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