For his own reasons, Vincent chose not to take offense. Nor did the ever-escalating pranks turn René into an enemy. Vincent gave the sixteen-year-old his own nickname: “the terror of the smoked herring,” a joking tribute to René’s talents as a fisherman. Seeing him often in his Wild West outfit, Vincent also called him “Buffalo Bill.” But, according to René, with Vincent’s “strange accent,” the name came out as “Puffalo Pill,”23 setting off a round of mockery every time he said it.
Even though he avoided the gang of boys that René led24 (just as he had avoided similar tormentors in virtually every place he ever lived), Vincent suffered René’s abuses without complaint, even in good humor (he never mentioned them in letters to Theo). The two continued to share drinks at Ravoux’s Inn and at an old poacher’s bar on the bank of the Oise about a mile outside town—René called it “our favorite watering hole,”25 Partly, Vincent tolerated the mischievous René to preserve his rare camaraderie with Gaston, whose ideas on painting Vincent considered advanced, according to René.26 No doubt he also appreciated that the brothers always paid the bar tab.27 The Secrétan brothers were also the right kind of company—sons of a respectable bourgeois family that could play an important role in Vincent’s delusive plan to lure Theo and his family to Auvers.28
But René Secrétan also supplied Vincent with something he could not get any other way: women. (There was no brothel in Auvers.)29
René had noticed how enviously Vincent watched when the cantinières came from Paris. When René and his cohorts sat on the riverbank kissing and fondling their girlfriends, Vincent was both titillated and timorous as he watched from a distance. “[Van Gogh] would modestly look the other way, which seemed madly funny to our little chicks,” René told Doiteau.30 Always looking for new ways to torment his brother’s friend, René encouraged the girls to try their wiles on the reticent painter—to “provoke him with their amorous attentions.”31
When these attentions had no apparent effect on Vincent, 32 René began to think that “it wasn’t only his ear that had been cut off, ”33 but then he caught Vincent with his pockets full of erotic photographs and books.34 Once, René discovered the painter masturbating in the woods.35 This humiliating encounter offered new opportunities for even crueler forms of mockery and torment. René dubbed him with a new taunting sobriquet: “faithful lover to the Widow Wrist.”36 It became easier and easier to achieve the desired effect of driving Vincent wild. Increasingly, “he took it very badly,” René recalled. “One day he became red with anger and wanted to kill everyone.”37
This was the poisonous atmosphere that prevailed between Vincent and René Secrétan in July 1890.
Another witness came forward in the decade following Van Gogh’s centenary. She was the daughter of a gentleman who, in 1878, had lived near one of Vincent’s favorite painting spots in Auvers,38 the former house and garden of the great French Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny. In the 1960s, when she gave an interview to the Van Gogh biographer Marc Tralbaut, she used only her married name, Madame Liberge. In 1890, she had been about twenty years old.39
Madame Liberge dismissed the traditional account of Vincent receiving his mortal wound in the wheat fields above the Auvers cemetery. She told Tralbaut:
I don’t know why people don’t tell the true story. It was not over there, by the cemetery…[Van Gogh] left the Ravoux Inn in the direction of the hamlet of Chaponval. At the rue Boucher he entered a small farmyard. There he hid behind the dunghill. Then he committed the act that led to his death a few hours later.40
Madame Liberge said that her father, a prominent citizen, had told her this account years before. “These were my father’s very words,” she said. “Why should he have wanted to invent such an absurd story and falsify history? Anyone who knew my father could tell you that he was always to be trusted.”41
Some years later, another Auvers resident named Madame Baize confirmed Madame Liberge’s story when she told a different interviewer that her grandfather “saw Vincent leave the Ravoux Inn that day and walk in the direction of the hamlet of Chaponval.”42 The same witness reported seeing Van Gogh enter a small farmyard on the rue Boucher and then hearing a gunshot. After waiting some time, “he went into the farmyard himself,” according to Madame Baize’s account, “but there was no one to be seen. No pistol and no blood, just a dung heap.”
The hamlet of Chaponval and the wheat fields behind the cemetery lay in opposite directions—the first to the west of the Ravoux Inn, the other to the east. The rue Boucher mentioned by Madame Baize intersects with the road to Chaponval less than half a mile west of the Ravoux Inn. At the time, the road to Chaponval (now called the rue Carnot) was lined with just the kind of walled farmyards described in both these accounts, which are separated by almost thirty years. Dung heaps were a common feature of such enclosures. Vincent often walked the Chaponval road to go to Pontoise, four miles away, where he took advantage of the better train service to have supplies sent from Paris and to dispatch his own work.43 The Chaponval road also led directly to a bend in the Oise, halfway between Auvers and Pontoise, where René Secrétan could usually be found,44 both because of the good fishing and because of the favorite bar.45 From this spot, René often launched his expeditions in search of adventure, entering Auvers along the Chaponval road.
The shot that killed Vincent van Gogh was probably fired not in a wheat field, but in or near a farmyard on the road to Chaponval like the one described by Madame Liberge and Madame Baize. Moreover, the gun that delivered the fatal blow was probably not brought into that farmyard by Vincent van Gogh, who knew nothing about guns and had no need of one, but by René Secrétan, who rarely went anywhere without his .380-caliber peashooter. The two may have encountered each other by accident on the Chaponval road, or they may have been returning from their favorite watering hole together. Gaston was almost certainly with them, as Vincent would have avoided René, whether alone or in the hostile company of his followers.
René had a history of teasing Vincent in a way intended to provoke him to anger. Vincent had a history of violent outbursts, especially when under the influence of alcohol. Once the gun in René’s rucksack was produced, anything could have happened—intentional or accidental—between a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West, an inebriated artist who knew nothing about guns,46 and an antiquated pistol with a tendency to malfunction.
Wounded, Vincent must have stumbled into the street as soon as he was able and headed toward the Ravoux Inn, leaving behind whatever painting gear he had brought. At first, he may have had no idea how seriously he was hurt. The wound did not bleed profusely.47 But once the initial shock wore off, the pain of his abdominal injury had to be excruciating.48 The Secrétan brothers would have been terrified. Whether they tried to give Vincent assistance cannot be known. But they apparently had the time and presence of mind to collect the pistol and all of Vincent’s belongings before hurrying off into the gathering dusk—so that when Madame Baize’s grandfather showed up soon afterward to investigate (if he did), he found only an empty farmyard and a dungheap.
THIS HYPOTHETICAL RECONSTRUCTION of the events of July 27, 1890, resolves many of the contradictions, fills many of the gaps, and fits together many of the misshapen pieces of the traditional narrative of suicide that has dominated Van Gogh mythology since the day of the shooting.
• It explains the immediate and permanent disappearance of all the evidence surrounding the incident, despite a police investigation that began the very next day. In his wounded state, Vincent would never have been able to clean up so thoroughly afterward, and nobody other than a guilty accomplice would have had a reason to take, hide, or dispose of the mostly worthless gear that he left behind. In their hasty cover-up of the deed, with night falling, the Secrétan brothers may well have missed something—a spot of blood or a spent cartridge—but the police would never have found it, because they were searching the wheat fields far away, not the farmyards on the Chaponval road.
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p; • It explains the oddities of Vincent’s wound as reported by the doctors who examined it: that the shot was to the body, not to the head; that the bullet entered from an unusual, oblique angle—not straight on as one would expect in a suicide; and that the shot appeared to have been fired from “too far out” for Vincent to have pulled the trigger.49
• It explains how Vincent, in his wounded state, could have dragged himself from the site of the shooting to the Ravoux Inn despite the hole in his abdomen and the severe pain aggravated by each step. Even the relatively short half-mile trek from the rue Boucher to the inn—a direct route over flat roadway—must have required an agony of effort. A long descent from the wheat fields along a steep, uneven path down a forested riverbank in the waning light of dusk (as legend would later have it) would have been virtually impossible in his condition.
• It explains the sightings of Vincent on the Chaponval road by two separate witnesses on the evening of the incident. As far as is known, no independent witness came forward to place Vincent in the vicinity of the wheat field (on the other side of town) where legend locates the shooting. Nor did anyone testify to seeing him anywhere on the long route he would have had to take between the wheat field and the Ravoux Inn. On a warm summer night in July, many residents would have been outside after sunset, eating, drinking, smoking, and gossiping (just as the Ravouxs were). Given that all of the routes that Vincent could have taken from the wheat field to the inn would have included populated public streets, and given his conspicuous staggering gait, surely someone would have seen him passing along the purported route that night.
• It explains why Vincent left no suicide note, and why Theo could find no trace of a “farewell” when he searched Vincent’s room and his studio in the days after the shooting. It explains why Vincent bothered to take a load of canvas and paint and other supplies on his expedition that day—something he would have been unlikely to do if he did not intend to return.
• It explains why he failed to “finish himself off” when his first (and only) shot went wrong, and chose instead to take the far more painful and embarrassing path back to his attic room at the Ravoux Inn.50
• It explains the strange disappearance of a haystack from the narrative of Van Gogh’s suicide. The very first written account of the shooting (in a letter from a mourner at the funeral) reported that Vincent had “placed his easel against a haystack before shooting himself.”51 But the later retellings of the story omitted this detail, presumably because no haystacks appear in the painting that was widely, but wrongly, considered Vincent’s last, Wheatfield with Crows. In fact, the “haystack” of the earliest reports was almost certainly the “dungheap” recalled by the later witnesses.
• It explains why the origin of the gun that inflicted the fatal wound was not revealed until seventy years later, even though it must have been known by a number of people at the time of the shooting. Auvers being a small town and revolvers being a rarity in rural France,52 many friends of both Gustave Ravoux, who lived a very public life, and René Secrétan, who brandished the weapon openly, surely were familiar with the innkeeper’s exotic firearm. Ravoux’s daughter, Adeline, made no mention of the connection between her father and the fatal weapon in any of her early accounts of Vincent’s death. When she finally admitted it, in the 1960s, she omitted René Secrétan from her narrative, instead maintaining that Vincent had obtained the gun directly from her father after asking for it in order to scare away crows—a cover story devised (probably by her father) to explain to the police how his pistol had come to be involved in the fatal shooting; to conceal his own culpability in putting a gun in the hands of a notoriously belligerent teenager; and to protect the Secrétan brothers (whose father was a rich and prominent patron) from a protracted and potentially embarrassing inquiry—even a trial—arising from what Ravoux almost certainly believed to be either an unfortunate accident or, at worst, an adolescent prank gone terribly wrong.
• Finally, this reconstruction explains why Vincent’s “confessions” to a suicide attempt, as reported by witnesses at the time, were so hesitant, halfhearted, and oddly hedged. When the police asked Vincent directly, “Did you want to commit suicide?” he answered with an indecisive “Yes, I believe so.”53 When they told him it was a crime to attempt suicide, he appeared more concerned that no one else should be blamed than that he himself might be charged with a crime. “Do not accuse anyone,” he responded; “it is I who wanted to kill myself.”54 Why would Vincent vehemently volunteer that he acted alone when the natural inference in any suicide would have been solitary intention and execution? Why would he urge the officers not to “accuse anyone” of the shooting and insist on taking sole responsibility? Vincent’s early and inexplicable defensiveness about the participation of others indicates an intent—indeed, a determination—to protect the Secrétan brothers from any implication of involvement in the incident.55
But why would Vincent go to such lengths to protect the Secrétan brothers, especially his tormentor René, from a police inquiry, or perhaps prosecution? Why would he repeatedly “confess” that he had shot himself with the intention of committing suicide when in fact he was the victim of a terrible accident, if not something worse?
The answer, we believe, is that Vincent welcomed death. “Poor fellow, he wasn’t granted a lavish share of happiness,” Theo wrote his wife from Vincent’s bedside in the final hours. “If only we could give him more faith in life.”56 Émile Bernard, who came to Auvers for the funeral, reported that Vincent had expressed his “desire to die.”57 Dr. Paul Gachet, another witness at Vincent’s deathbed, wrote Theo only two weeks after the funeral expressing his admiration for “the sovereign disdain that [Vincent] felt for life”58 and comparing his end to a martyr’s embrace of death. As Vincent himself had once written (and boldly underlined): “I would not expressly seek death … but I would not try to evade it if it happened.”59
In fact, whether by accident or negligence or malice, René Secrétan may have provided Vincent the escape that he longed for but was unable or unwilling to bring upon himself, after a lifetime spent disavowing suicide as “moral cowardice” and “the deed of a dishonest man.”60 Having just returned from a disastrous visit to Paris during which he had been made painfully aware of the burden he imposed on Theo and his young family, Vincent undoubtedly saw his chance to “withdraw”—just as he had withdrawn from Paris in 1888—and spare his brother further heartache (see chapter 29).
With so much to be gained, Vincent must have seen no reason, no benefit, in dragging the Secrétans—even the mischievous, careless René—into the glare of public inquiry and embarrassment simply for having done him this favor.
OUR RECONSTRUCTION RELIES heavily on the interviews that René Secrétan gave to Victor Doiteau in 1956 and in 1957, the year of his death at the age of eighty-three.61 While his artistic older brother Gaston62 went on to become a cabaret singer of some renown, writing songs for films in the twenties and thirties63 and even appearing in a few of them,64 René had lived his life far from the world of art. After his rambunctious adolescence, he settled down to become a rich and respected member of society. He had a long and distinguished career as a banker, businessman, and shooting champion.65
Despite his advanced age, René was an excellent witness. Doiteau, who met and corresponded with him often, described him as in good physical and mental condition until the end of his life.66 Unlike so many witnesses, René gave his first account of Vincent’s last days long after the painter had become famous. He came forward not in order to attach himself to the painter’s legend or claim a piece of his immortality, but simply to set the record straight. He had seen a story in Paris Match about the release of the movie Lust for Life that featured a picture of Kirk Douglas playing Vincent van Gogh. The image of the hale, handsome, wholesome Douglas so violated René’s sense of duty to the truth that he could hold back his story no longer. The picture “bore no resemblance to our friend who always looked more like a tram
p with shoes on his feet,” he told Doiteau.67 René’s account to Doiteau, taken as a whole, not only runs counter to the projections of Stone and Hollywood that dominated the era, but is richly and convincingly detailed, internally consistent, sometimes independently verifiable, and not self-inflating or self-serving. Indeed, it is often self-indicting, both intentionally and unintentionally.
However, despite his astonishing frankness in revealing his own abusive, belligerent behavior toward Vincent, René never confessed to having any direct role in the painter’s fatal shooting on July 27, 1890. Regarding the events of that day, René told Doiteau that Vincent had stolen the gun from his rucksack and recalled vaguely that both he and Gaston left for the family’s villa in Normandy sometime in July and that he first learned of Vincent’s death by reading about it in a major Paris daily newspaper,68 although he could not remember which one, and no such article has surfaced since. But his denials lack the consistency and conviction of the rest of his account. As nowhere else in his many recollections, they betray the lawyerly caution of a man who knows he is speaking for the record. For example, he told Doiteau that he carried his rucksack (containing the heavy pistol) everywhere he went—yet he didn’t notice that the gun was missing before he left for Normandy. Elsewhere, he implied that Vincent had stolen the pistol from him on the very day of the shooting, placing himself still in Auvers at the time.69
In these faltering denials, as much as in his many boisterous confessions, we hear the voice of a man who had kept the truth to himself for a lifetime but could not die without telling it—or at least most of it—to ease his conscience at the end.
THE STORY THAT VINCENT’S DEATH was the result of a botched suicide attempt took shape over a period of more than seventy years. The earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days immediately after the event—do not mention suicide. When Paul Gachet, one of the doctors treating Vincent, wrote Theo on July 28 to summon him to Auvers,70 he said nothing about the circumstances or the nature of Vincent’s injury except that he had “wounded himself.”71
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