the air is smudged the color of soot beneath the slow and relentless outpouring of coal; the soot that belches endlessly from the tall chimneys covers the countryside and it seems sickly, laid to waste in the eddying smoke, as if convulsed, ravaged and swollen with the abscesses of the slagheaps of the coal mines.
Barely a tree interrupted this desolate vista. Except for a few small gardens, cultivation of any kind had retreated from the black assault of the huge, exhaling slagheaps. Even in summer, one visitor noted, the land was so stripped of greenery that “it stirred one’s heart to see the dusty leaves of a dried-up geranium on a window-ledge.” In the winter, snow turned gray as it fell. When it melted, the gray soil turned black, roads turned into tarlike mud so thick it sucked the shoes off travelers’ feet, and water ran black in the streams. Even on days that should have been clear, gray vapor from the slagheaps and soot from the smokestacks hung in the air, blurring the boundary between ground and sky. Nights descended into a starless, netherworldly darkness. Locals called it le pays noir—the black country.
In the featureless brick and stucco towns that punctuated every mile of sunken roads, Vincent met the real Borins: the black people of the black country. “The people are quite black when they come out of the dark mines,” he reported to Theo; “they look exactly like chimney sweeps.” Not just the men, but whole families wore the stain of the mines. Children worked because only their tiny bodies could squeeze through the fissures in the earth where the coal hid; wives, because their families needed the money. After work, the men squatted on the doorsteps of their tumbledown cottages and smoked, while the women—“artificial negresses,” one observer called them—dragged children “with the faces of old people” to fetch water for the daily dénoircissement—unblackening.
MARCASSE COAL MINE, PIT #7 (Illustration credit 12.1)
For the men the dénoircissement no longer worked. Most bore the permanent marks of scratches and grazes in the mines, the white skin of their arms and chests tattooed “like blue-veined marble.” Indeed, they bore all the scars of their labor: tired, bent-over bodies (life expectancy averaged forty-five years); emaciated, weather-beaten faces; the memory of loved ones lost to the mines; and the knowledge that their children would follow them into the earth because, as Émile Zola wrote, “nobody had yet invented a way of living without food.” Every morning, as husbands, sons, and daughters said good-bye to wives and mothers, they wept, according to another account, “as though they were never going to return.”
In a “vast, dismal human herd” they headed to the mines. In the winter, they set out before the first gray of dawn, by lamplight, toward the ominous beacons of the blue-flamed blast furnaces and the coke ovens’ red glare. In every coal town in the Borinage, the mine overshadowed all else. With its mountain of slag, its towering chimney and fantastical metal scaffolding, the mine could be seen and smelt for miles around. And heard. The earsplitting sound of its great turning wheel, the panting exhaust of its massive engine, the thundering of its ironworks, and the incessant ringing of bells that marked its every heaving movement spread across the landscape almost as far as its choking cinders. Surrounded by high brick walls indistinguishable from fortifications, and a moat of cinder and stinking gas, the mine swallowed thousands of workers every morning “like some evil beast,” wrote Zola in Germinal, his novel set in a French coal mine just across the border, “struggling to digest its meal of human flesh.”
SOMEHOW, VINCENT FOUND new energy for the new task. Despite the self-inflicted rigors of his life in Brussels, he arrived in the Borinage “well-dressed” and “display[ing] all the characteristics of Dutch cleanliness,” according to the minister who greeted him. To spare the French-speaking Borins the perils of his difficult Dutch name, he presented himself simply as “Monsieur Vincent.”
Armed with his father’s recommendation, passable French, and replenished ardor, he soon found a position in Petit Wasmes, one of a cluster of small towns that cowered together in the shadow of the Marcasse and Frameries mines. There a small congregation had just started its own church and was, by law, entitled to a state-paid preacher. While that position was being finalized, the regional evangelical committee agreed to give Vincent a six-month trial as a “lay preacher and teacher of catechism.” They offered him a small salary and, after a brief stay with a colporteur in nearby Pâturages, installed him with one of their most prosperous members, Jean-Baptiste Denis, a farmer who lived with his five sons in a “rather fine house” in Petit Wasmes.
Vincent immediately started a catechism class for the children of the congregation. He read to them, led them in hymns, and taught them Bible stories using maps of the Holy Land that he drew. In the evenings, he visited members’ houses, where small groups gathered for devotional “classes.” He also visited the sick, “since there are so many of them here,” he told Theo. “I have just visited a little old woman [who] is terribly ill, but full of faith and patience. I read a chapter with her and prayed with them all.” His initial letters home were filled with enthusiastic reports of his new ministry. “It’s the kind of work he likes to do,” Anna wrote, entertaining yet another cautious hope. “He is so content there.” These early reports impressed even his wary father. “He seems to work with success and ambition,” Dorus wrote Theo in January. “We are so glad for him. ”
Because it had only recently split from the church in Wasmes, Vincent’s new congregation had to meet in an old dance hall, the Salon du Bébé. The hall, which seated almost a hundred, had already been adapted for religious use in a region awash in evangelical missions. In his attic room at the Denis house, Vincent prepared sermons for the workmen and farmers who shuffled into the Bébé every Sunday. He took up again the message of the preacher from Lyon: “We should think of [Christ] as a workman,” he preached, “with lines of sorrow and suffering and fatigue on his face.” Who could better understand the life of a “workman and laborer whose life is hard,” he asked, “than the son of a carpenter … who labored for thirty years in a humble carpenter’s shop to fulfill God’s will”?
For inspiration, Vincent had only to look outside at the dreary procession of miners that passed under his window every morning: men and women dressed in identical “pit rags,” their clogs clattering in the predawn darkness. Or every night, fourteen hours later, when they returned—“just the same as yesterday, and just the same as tomorrow,” according to one account, “as it has been for hundreds of years. Like true slaves.”
It was only a matter of time before Vincent’s fervor drove him to join the gray line filing into the earth.
“It is a gloomy spot,” he wrote about his visit to the Marcasse mine, one of the oldest, grimmest, and most dangerous in the area: “poor miners’ huts, a few dead trees black from smoke, thorn hedges, dunghills, ash dumps, heaps of useless coal.” He made his way to the pit-head through the vast, surreal townscape of the mine complex: the tarpaulin-covered screening shed, the winding house, the drainage pump tower, the coke ovens and blast furnaces. In the distance, slag horses made their slow way up the sides of the black mountain dragging tub after tub of cinder and refuse coal. He probably passed through the locker room, where a huge coal-fired stove gave miners what Zola called “a good skin-full of warmth” before they headed down.
But nothing could have prepared him for the pit-head, a cavernous brick building palled in grimy windows and furious with motion: the shiver of the big copper engine, the churning of its steel arms, the ceaseless throbbing of its exhaust; the thunder of heavy tubs rumbling across the iron floor; the whining of inky cables flying overhead. The cables passed from the engine’s great wheel through greasy pulleys suspended from an iron framework that towered over the pit-head like a skeletal steeple. The screeching of the pulleys announced the arrival and departure of the cages as they appeared from the depths with loads of coal and then dived down again filled with miners—“swallowing men as though the pit were a mouth gulping them down,” wrote Zola.
The c
age plunged 635 meters, dropping “like a stone” more than a third of a mile. Miners stood barefoot, lamps in hand, huddled together in empty coal tubs, as the guide beams in the shaft “flew past like a rail under an express train.” The air turned intensely cold and water began to rain down on the cage from the shaft walls: first a trickle, then a deluge. They flew past three abandoned levels: so deep that the miners referred to the world above as “up in Hell”; so deep that the daylight visible at the top of the shaft dwindled to a spot as small as a star in the sky.
From the hewn “hall” at the bottom of the shaft, galleries radiated out in every direction in search of the elusive coal seams, some only inches thick, folded like loose drapery throughout the rocky underworld. As Vincent stumbled down one of these dark alleys toward the distant din of picks, the timbered roof and plank walls lowered and narrowed—he compared the tunnels to “big chimneys.” Puddles of water on the floor spread into a seamless pool. The temperature quickly rose from the freezing hurricane at the shaft, where ventilation was best, to the warmer, windless air of the galleries. Eventually, he was walking bent over through ankle-deep water in “suffocating heat, as heavy as lead.”
Now and then he heard a dull roar in the tunnel ahead “like the rumbling of a storm.” Seconds later an apparition would materialize in the darkness: a horse pulling a train of full tubs. He had to flatten himself against the jagged, slippery walls to let it pass. The miners envied the well-fed horses, who lived their entire lives underground in comfortable warmth and the “good smell of fresh straw kept clean.” Deeper still, where the horses couldn’t go, pit-boys and haulage girls dragged the tubs: the boys shouting foul language as loudly as they could, the girls “snorting and steaming like overloaded mares,” as Zola described them.
Finally, he came to the miners. The gallery did not end so much as fray—dissolving into an ambiguity of tiny chimneys and impossibly narrow tunnels that “seemed to go on forever,” he said. At the end of each one, a miner toiled alone in the darkness. Vincent called these tiny niches “des caches”: “hiding places, places where men search.” He compared them to cells in “an underground prison,” or “partitions in a crypt.” “In each of those cells,” he explained to Theo, “a miner in a coarse linen suit, filthy and black as a chimney sweep, is busy hewing coal by the pale light of a small lamp.”
Vincent’s trip into the Marcasse mine in January 1879 represented the high point of his two years in the Borinage. He would descend into the earth at least once more during his stay (in March of that year), but by then he had begun a much more perilous descent: a descent into depths that he would not visit again until ten years later when he was confined in a hospital in Arles for insanity: a descent into the blackest country of all.
THE DROP BEGAN almost immediately. “We are beginning to worry about him again,” Dorus wrote only weeks after Vincent began his ministry at the Bébé; “troubles show on the horizon.” The Borins did not take to their new preacher, nor he to them. Vincent’s geography-book vision of devout miners confronting darkness and death with a “happy disposition” quickly foundered on the reality of a reticent, clannish people. When he first arrived, he described them to Theo as “simple and good-natured.” Before long, they had become “ignorant and untaught”—“nervous,” “sensitive,” and “mistrustful.”
He puzzled over their strange regional dialect “which comes out with amazing speed,” he complained. He tried to keep up by speaking his Parisian French as fast as possible—a strategy that only resulted in more misunderstandings and at least one angry altercation. He seemed surprised to discover that most of his congregation could not read, and soon lamented that, as “a man of culture and decency,” he could not find “companionship” in such “uncivilized surroundings.” The miners, too, recognized their new preacher for a stranger. Attendance at his sermons, which he gave in French, started “haphazardly” and soon fell off. Lacking “a miner’s character and temperament,” Vincent lamented, he would “never get along with them or gain their confidence.”
As he always did when reality threatened, Vincent withdrew deeper and deeper into delusion. He stoutly defended the “picturesqueness” of the blighted landscape and the “charm” of the Borins. He compared the black slagheaps to the lovely dunes of Scheveningen. “One has a homelike feeling here,” he maintained, “like on the heath.” Even his trip into the mine could not break his hold on the vision of it that had summoned him to the Borinage. He called his six-hour visit to the hellish Marcasse mine “a very interesting expedition.” His account of it reads like a naturalist’s report on the habitat of bugs or birds: filled with technical terms (maintenages, gredins, accrochage, tailles à droit, tailles à plat), but not a word of outrage or empathy. While acknowledging the mine’s “bad reputation”—“because many perish in it, either going down or coming up, or through poisoned air, firedamp explosion, water seepage, cave-ins, etc.”—he insisted that life in the mines was better than life in the desolate villages above; and that the miners preferred the permanent night of their work to the “dead and forsaken life” of the upper world, “[just] as mariners ashore are homesick for the sea, notwithstanding all the dangers and hardships which threaten them.”
Vincent barricaded his delusion with images. Everything from the desolate landscape to the sight of injured miners reminded him of a favorite print. The deadly fog created “a fantastic chiaroscuro effect” like “pictures by Rembrandt.” He thought Matthijs Maris might make a “wonderful picture” of the “emaciated, weather-beaten” miners. And if any artist could paint the miners at work in their Stygian cells, he imagined, “[that] would be something new and unheard of.”
Rather than recognize the pandemic of real suffering all around him, he returned to the images of suffering in his favorite books. “There is still so much slavery in the world,” he wrote about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “and in this remarkably wonderful book that important question is treated with so much wisdom, so much love, and such zeal and interest in the true welfare of the poor oppressed.” Although he never recorded a disapproving word about the treatment of the miners in the Borinage—a region notorious even in an insensitive era for its horrendous working conditions—he hailed Dickens’s Hard Times as “a masterpiece,” for its “moving and sympathetic portrait of a working man.” At one point, he seemed to admit preferring the facsimile of the poor and oppressed that he found in prints and books to the reality outside his window. “A picture by Mauve or Maris or Israëls,” he insisted, “says more and says it more clearly, than nature herself.”
He preached his delusion. Vincent had come to a region boiling with labor unrest. In the thirty years since Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in nearby Brussels, the coal miners of the Borinage had spearheaded a socialist workers’ movement that would eventually sweep across the Continent. Wave after wave of bloody strikes and brutal suppressions had spawned a militant union movement supported in communities like Wasmes by a network of clubs, cooperatives, and mutualités, all determined to redress the cruelty and injustice of the new capitalist order.
But Vincent’s vision of the miners as Christian heroes did not admit of victimhood. Their misery, like his own, brought them closer to God. They needed Thomas à Kempis, not Karl Marx. Rather than rebel, he exhorted them to celebrate their suffering—rejoice in their sorrow. “God wills that in imitation of Christ, man should live and walk humbly on earth,” he preached, “not reaching for the sky, but bowing to humble things, learning from the Gospel to be meek and humble of heart.” He had come expecting the miners, as the people who “walked in darkness,” to embrace this Kempian message of serene resignation—for him, the ultimate comfort for the wretched and oppressed, just as it was for the ash-cart horse.
Through strikes and work stoppages and “rebellious speeches,” some of which he attended, Vincent clung to that vision. “Child of God, exiled on the earth,” he underlined in the dog-eared psalmbook that he used at the Bébé, “raise your eye
s, a little patience, and you will be consoled, going toward God.” But in a community seething with grievances, where wages had fallen by a third in the previous three years and people died by the hundreds in explosions and cave-ins and unchecked epidemics, Vincent’s message only separated him further from the “poor creatures” that he longed to comfort.
Only one path to consolation remained to him: ministering to the sick. The mines of the Borinage discarded hundreds of broken workers every year, burned and crushed, poisoned by gas or cinders or horrific hygiene. The diseased and the dying did not question Vincent’s delusions or parse his sermons. They welcomed the strange Dutchman for the help he offered when so few others did. “There have been many cases of typhoid and malignant fever,” he reported to Theo. “In one house they are all ill with fever and have little or no help, so that the patients have to nurse the patients.”
Vincent threw himself into this tide of suffering with selfless abandon. He visited households quarantined for typhus, offered to do chores, and sat vigil for days. After mine accidents and explosions, he rushed to help care for the injured, including one man who was “burnt from head to toe.” He ripped linen bandages and applied them with wax and olive oil that he sometimes paid for himself. He worked “day and night,” according to one account, sitting beside sickbeds praying and evangelizing, and “fell to his knees with fatigue and joy” when patients recovered.
But it wasn’t enough. Before long, Vincent returned to the familiar dark spiral of self-blame and self-abuse. He refused all food except for bread—no butter—and a gruel of rice and sugar water. He neglected his clothes, washed infrequently, and often walked in the bitter winter weather without a coat. As in Amsterdam and Brussels, he found his accommodations “too luxurious,” and soon moved from the Denis house in Petit Wasmes to a tiny abandoned thatch-roofed hut nearby. He rejected the comfort of a bed and sought out “the hardest wood” from which to make a plank for sleeping. He hung his prints on the hut walls and withdrew deeper and deeper into his private world: tending the sick and injured by day; reading, smoking, studying the Bible, and underlining his psalmbook by night. He lost weight until Denis’s wife feared that in his weakened condition, exposed in his little hut, he would fall victim to the typhoid epidemic that raged all around.
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