“Does Monsieur van Gogh’s reasoning seem disturbed?”
“Without doubt,” I said, describing the Foreign Legion scheme. Charcot nodded, tapping the end of a pen against his blotter. There was a moment’s pause. I waited, for it seemed he was formulating a statement.
“Of course you know, Doctor, that I cannot make a diagnosis without seeing the patient.” I nodded without interrupting him. “I would be very interested to meet this gentleman. There seems to be a high incidence of hysteria among men of genius; painters, musicians, authors. However, they are resistant patients. Sometimes they fear that improvement of their mental illness will adversely affect their creative abilities. I treat some of these gentlemen privately. I cannot intervene with them as strenuously as I do with my patients at the clinic. Some of the treatments, or indeed the diagnostic methods, are painful or unpleasant, like what you just witnessed. The patients who come to me reluctantly would not tolerate them.”
“And, if I may ask—why does a patient like that poor Bernet willingly submit to having an attack brought on?” I asked.
“Because he is so unhappy, and he hopes we will be able to help him,” Charcot answered. “With some patients who exhibit hysterogenic zones, like Bernet, an attack can be halted—as well as initiated—with pressure. We have not found this to be true yet for Bernet, but we hope that in time it will be.”
I was not aware that my expression revealed my pity, but the doctor was famous for his powers of observation. “You must remember, colleague, that as doctors we are sometimes required to inflict pain in order to find out how to end it.” I could only nod my acceptance. “Now, to return to your Monsieur van Gogh,” he went on. “I would eagerly see him as a private patient. I have a sizable practice based at my house on Boulevard St.-Germain. Do you think Van Gogh would consent to an examination?”
“I don’t know, Doctor. I believe he is very distressed. He is a great stoic, but at the moment he is in despair. If he thought his suffering could be relieved, he might see you.”
Charcot now picked up his pen and held it gently between his two extended forefingers. He sighed and replaced it on the blotter, then raised his dark eyes to mine. “I cannot pretend to you that we have any way to end hysteria,” he said. “I have known the attacks to become less frequent, less violent. More generally, though, they continue.”
“Until?” I asked. “For the rest of life?”
He leaned back in his chair. “Our specialty is a difficult one, isn’t it? I sometimes envy the men who can set a bone or stitch up a wound and be confident they have accomplished something. Despite all the progress we have made, these mental maladies are still baffling. Before you leave, Doctor, I suggest you visit the old sections of the hospital, where the restantes stay. The dormitories and workshops are still full. We sometimes cure patients. Usually that is when they have not been ill for long. But the truth is that we do not know exactly how we do it. When a patient leaves here and has no more hysterical attacks, we do not know whether the baths helped her, or the separation from her family, or the nourishing food. I sometimes send my private patients to Dr. Fourgon in Passy, and the hysterics are sometimes cured, in about the same proportion as the hysterics who stay here. But, again, I don’t know why.”
He got to his feet. I rose, too. I am not a tall man, but he was even shorter than I. Still, there was a strong air about him, an impression of competence and assurance. Next to him I felt somehow insubstantial, as if I were not quite everything I had thought.
“Thank you for your generosity and your frankness, dear Doctor,” I said, holding out my hand. “I will talk to Monsieur van Gogh. I hope I can persuade him to come and see you. His last visit to Paris was unhappy, but if I accompany him …” I trailed off. “I will send word if we decide to make the trip. Thank you again.” He shook my hand warmly and inclined his head to acknowledge my thanks.
I visited the older wards of the hospital as Dr. Charcot had suggested. I had intended to all along: what man, returning to the site of his professional formation, would not take the time to roam around and attempt to come to terms with the intervening years? What man would not walk the paths he used to walk, hoping to see his younger self, hurrying forward toward some goal? We want to know what is the same and what is different, in us and in that old world. As I came around the corner to the cour des agités, I smiled slightly, and resolved to walk part of the way home, past the École des Beaux-Arts. Perhaps I would see a saffron-haired ghost peering out of a garret window on the rue de Seine.
Little seemed to have changed in this part of the great old hospital. The alterations that had brought the surrounding area into the nineteenth century—almost into the twentieth—did not penetrate the walls of the asylum, apparently. I crossed several courtyards, hearing the familiar sounds: the beating of a small drum to help seamstresses keep time in a workroom, the rhythmic scrape of a rake, a high voice wailing. In one courtyard a gardener wheeling a barrow thanked me for stepping off the path. He called me “Doctor.” What else could I be, in that place?
I crossed to the archway between buildings and turned left into the long hallway without thinking. I found the door I knew was there and opened it. Three steps led down into the courtyard, and a stout wardress stood at the bottom. She looked up at me.
“Good morning,” I said. “My name is Dr. Gachet. I was an extern here many years ago and I just met with Dr. Charcot. He suggested I might visit the section of the hospital where I worked. May I stay here for a moment?”
“As you like, Doctor,” she said. “I doubt you’ll see much difference.”
I gazed around. “No,” I agreed. “Nothing has changed.” It was remarkable. The trees were perhaps taller. The gravel must have been renewed at some point. The patients, however, could have come from Gautier’s painting The Madwomen of the Salpêtrière. Poor Gautier, now deep in debt—I wished he were with me now. We would have sat on the steps with our drawing pads, and I would have believed I could help these poor creatures. “Do you have any hysterics in this group?” I asked the wardress.
“No, these women are all quiet. The hysterics upset them. One minute your hysteric’s strolling around calmly, next minute she’s upside down and screaming. Having them in with the calm ones just upsets everybody.”
“You’ve worked with them?” I pursued the subject.
“Of course. Some of us like it, adds some interest. I don’t. I feel for these poor things.” She gestured to an obvious melancholiac sitting on a bench in the shade. “Poor Gabrielle, how can you not pity her? Gentle, kind, hates to give trouble. Some of the hysterics put it on for Dr. Charcot, you know. He says they have fits, so they have fits. He says the fits look like this or that, sure enough they do. They like to get off work, go over to the studio and be photographed. Sometimes they perform in his lectures, and I do mean perform!”
This did not surprise me terribly. If the women intuited what Charcot and his students wanted to see in a “hysterical” patient, they would provide that. I had seen a few volumes of the famous Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, published by one of Charcot’s protégés, and some of the patients had appeared very knowing indeed.
“Do they ever get better?” I asked.
The wardress looked carefully at me for the first time. “You should know that if you’re a doctor. Or don’t you treat the mad anymore?”
I looked up at the sky, holding my hat on my head. “Sometimes I wonder if anyone gets better,” I said.
She frowned, and her eyes shifted away. “Well,” she said. “If you say so.” She caught sight of a woman on the ground, scrabbling at the earth with her hands. “Cécile,” she called out, and bustled away. “Cécile, we do not dig!” The woman, spotting her, only began to dig faster, though her busy fingers made no visible hole in the hard ground. It was a futile exercise. She was acting on compulsion, a mysterious command that told her to dig, here, now. Dig. I didn’t think my compulsion to visit the madwomen had been much more p
roductive.
Twelve
I WAS NOT EAGER to have a conversation about hysteria with Vincent. It was not that I was afraid. I did not fear that he would turn on me. No, my apprehension was more complex. I was awestruck, you might say, the way a novice monk is cowed by his superior. It was as if Vincent had advanced further than I in some special devotion. He was privy to exalted mysteries in the church of mental illness, and this distinction made him fearsome.
According to Ravoux, Vincent was still leaving the inn before eight and coming home around sunset, exhausted. He was sometimes spotted up on the plateau, either sitting in front of a canvas or making his way to another site, carrying his easel and canvas like an ant with an unwieldy burden. I chose to look for him there. The sun had long since slid from the vertical, but it was still hot. The cicadas, which come late to Auvers, were buzzing in the trees, starting and stopping according to some mysterious signal.
The afternoon was quite still. Sun and shadows lapped over the wheat fields, dark gold and bright. The heads of the wheat are mobile and sensitive, bending in the slightest breeze, but there was none that afternoon. My footsteps crackled as I trudged through one of the fields. No human figure emerged from the sea of grain. Vincent must have gone in a different direction. As I traversed the long field to reach the westbound path, I thought I might as well be in one of his paintings. The golden field with its infinite tones of ocher and yellow was set off by the brilliant blue sky, provided by nature to carry out Vincent’s own theory of complementary colors. Each made the other more intense. I merely crept along the seam between them, feeling very small.
I was hot, so I was very relieved when I saw a tiny figure, no more than a nick on the horizon, and recognized it as Vincent. He was perched at the top of a crest a few hundred meters away, almost swallowed by the wheat. From there he would have a magnificent view of the slope down to the Oise.
He faced away from me, but he must have heard me coming from quite a distance. I found it hard to catch my breath as I toiled up the slope. When I reached him, I could only stand behind him, panting. I looked out at what he had chosen to paint, and it was beautiful. The river, furred with willows, lay in a languorous curve. Vincent would have placed that in the bottom third of the canvas. Then, stretching toward the horizon, he would stack up the fields, those fertile lowland plots, each showing a variant green according to the crop: beans, peas, beetroot. He would use a different pattern of brushwork, too, for each. Some would be dotted, some zigzagged, some painted with a basket-weave or chevron pattern. Then he could use broader, looser strokes for the sky, whose blue softened toward the horizon.
But he had done none of these things. The canvas on his easel was perfectly white. Perhaps he had just arrived. Perhaps there was a canvas next to him, already finished.
I stepped to his side. “It is a magnificent prospect,” I said. “The light at this hour is especially lovely.”
“It is, Doctor,” he said.
I glanced down. I saw no finished canvas. His palette lay on his lap. The colors dotted it in slick cushions: lead white, ultramarine, chrome yellow, three different greens. His right hand clasped three brushes, but they were all clean.
“Did you just get here?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “I have been here all day.”
“But,” I protested, gesturing at the paint. “You just set up your palette.”
He took one of the brushes and flipped it around. With the wooden end he poked the dome of white to show me that a heavy skin had formed. The paint had been drying for hours. “By now these are the wrong colors,” he said. “There is too much blue. They would have been right this morning.” He looked up at me. “Then after a few hours, I would have needed more yellow and ocher. A harder blue, probably cobalt. Then some darker green. Now—” He set the palette on the ground and reached into the box by his side. “Geranium lake, perhaps. The sky will show pink soon.” He tossed a tube onto the ground. “I would need to mix up a purple.” Another tube dropped. “And if I sit here long enough, I will need darker blues, and darker.” He kept reaching into the box, scrabbling for tubes of paint and flinging them ever farther away. “No black, though, Doctor,” he said, in a controlled tone. “I have painted night scenes before. I can do it without black. In fact,” he went on, getting up from his folding stool, “I only have a small tube.”
He crouched in front of the paint box and tipped it upside down. Out fell a small avalanche of crumpled lead shapes. He pawed through them, tossing aside one after another while saying their beautiful names like an incantation: “vermilion, viridian, Prussian blue, malachite green. Ah! Here we are. Black. You see? A small tube.” He held it up to me. “I always have to ask Theo for the largest tubes of yellow.” He unscrewed the top and squeezed a thin rope of darkness onto his palette. The coil grew, invading the blue, then the green. With both hands, he pressed the pigment from the bottom of the tube, carefully urging every last smear of black out of the soft metal casing. Then he hurled the tube far into the wheat, so far that I could barely hear the rustle when it landed.
He knelt on the ground now, with his palette before him. I stood just a foot away, silent, appalled. In another individual—if this had been my son, Paul, for example—I would have thought this behavior nothing more than frustration, a showy explosion of anger. Yet anger was absent in Vincent. His voice was little more than a thread, and he moved in a measured way, as if carrying out a ritual. He looked up at me. He met my gaze for a moment, then shifted his eyes to something behind me and very far away. No number of words could have said more clearly that my presence did not matter. He looked down, and put his right hand squarely onto his palette. He pressed down.
The black oozed up between his fingers. The membrane covering the half-dried pigments gave way so that streaks of white and yellow seeped into the black. He twisted his hand, sliding his splayed fingers through the knots of brighter color. Paint crawled across the tops of his fingers and crept up his wrist. Then he held his palm out to me. “You see, Doctor? This is why you have to be so careful with black, it soon overwhelms everything.”
That black hand held toward me seemed like a threat. What was he going to do? Rub it on his face? On the canvas? Smear it onto his other hand, wipe it onto his clothes, suck the paint from his fingers? He sat before me on the ground, unkempt, sunburned, and streaked with paint like the maddest of madmen. Yet he was perfectly aware, completely controlled.
He lowered his hand into his lap, and his face became, if it was possible, even bleaker. “So,” he said. “That is the end of that.” He turned his palm down and drew it across the ground before him, dragging a shadow over the trampled stems of wheat.
“Doctor,” Vincent said. “There should be a rag in the drawer of the paint box. Perhaps it might be useful.” He was twisting handfuls of wheat stems into a makeshift brush and scraping at the spaces between his fingers. I stepped around him and righted the paint box, opening the drawer and finding a wad of grayish linen, crusted with orange and blue. He took it with his left hand and scrubbed his wrist where the tide of oily colors had left the shadow of a glove. Finished, he let the rag drop to the ground. Then he turned back to the magnificent scene before him, glowing more golden now. I had the sense that the episode, whatever it was, had reached its end. I lifted the blank canvas off the easel and set it down, collapsing the easel to rest beside me. I did not want that white rectangle to reproach my friend for a moment longer. Using the tips of my fingers, I maneuvered the palette out of sight. Then I sat on the stool, shoulder to shoulder with Vincent. All of my hesitation and timidity fell away.
“We have not seen you,” I said. “I was worried.”
“I have not been fit for company.”
“Not as a guest, then,” I said. “But as a patient.”
He brushed away my comment with the paint-stained hand. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“Have you been distressed?” I asked. “Do you feel there is ano
ther attack coming on?” But even as I asked my questions, I knew they were futile.
“Doctor,” Vincent said, scratching his eyebrow, “I know you are a sympathetic man. I know that you would like to be able to make me feel better. I would like that myself.” He turned toward me, with a dark streak now shading one of his eyes. “Do you have a potion? Or is it an electrical treatment? Little waves of current jolting through me”—here he jiggled his body slightly—“to set my brain aright?” He kept his eyes on mine, and this time I felt that he was completely engaged. This was the opportunity, I knew. He had come to a crisis of some kind and was ready to acknowledge his state.
“I saw a doctor in Paris,” I began. “He studies hysteria. It sounds in many ways like what troubles you. The attacks sound very similar, with the voices, visual hallucinations, shouting and thrashing. I witnessed an attack while I was at the hospital visiting him. It was dreadful,” I finished. There was a pause. “I would like to spare you from going through that again.”
“But can you, Doctor?” Vincent asked. “Can this new doctor?”
The question hung there. A troop of cicadas started to thrum in the trees, then stopped. In the silence, I remembered Charcot’s voice saying, “I cannot pretend to you that we have any way to end hysteria.”
“He has found ways …” I found my voice faltering. “Sometimes he is able to reduce the intensity of the attacks, he says. Or the frequency. Or both.” I met Vincent’s gaze.
“I have seen doctors,” he said mildly. “They did not help me.”
“No, but Charcot is an expert. He has seen more cases like yours than anyone in France.”
“And the patient you saw in the hospital, was he getting better?”
I had to admit it. “No.”
“Was Dr. Charcot confident that he could help this man?”
I could not pretend to Vincent that Charcot had been confident. I drew breath to speak. I was going to say, “No, but perhaps he can help you.” I was going to say, “He may be able to find a way. We should at least try this.” I exhaled and shook my head. Charcot himself had warned me how little he could do in cases like Vincent’s. I drew breath again.
Leaving Van Gogh Page 19