Rue Dulau
Arles-sur-Rhône
Dear Dr. Rey,
I feel it my duty to inform you that Monsieur van Gogh has been the victim of another attack. He fell ill without warning the evening of 23 December, the year anniversary of his first crise. He has suffered considerable despondency and once again tried to ingest his own paints.
Monsieur Trabuc tells me that Monsieur van Gogh was in an uncommonly cheerful mood in the weeks leading up to the latest crise: painting actively, eating well, engaging in lengthy conversations. His journey to Arles in November brought no ill effects, and in fact seemed to lift his spirits. Monsieur Trabuc reports that Monsieur van Gogh kept busy after this trip preparing a series of paintings for an upcoming exhibition in Brussels. He spoke optimistically about the possibility of selling his work there.
The only annoyance he seems to have experienced is that he wished to visit Arles again for the Christmas holiday, but I did not permit it. I felt it unwise given that Arles was the location of his collapse a year ago, and I am certain you would agree with that decision. This attack was considerably briefer than the previous crise during the summer, and Monsieur van Gogh has almost fully recovered. Nonetheless, it is disheartening that he should fall ill again.
I will keep you informed of further developments.
With regards,
Th. Peyron, Director
Maison de Santé de Saint-Rémy de Provence
25 January 1890
Dr. Félix Rey, chef interne
Hospices civils de la Ville d’Arles
Rue Dulau
Arles-sur-Rhône
Dear Dr. Rey,
Monsieur van Gogh has once more suffered a crise. He fell ill two days after a brief visit to Arles to see a sick friend, the wife of his former landlord, although it is my conviction that the sick friend was not the reason for the collapse. Did he also visit you in Arles? Do you have any suspicions why this attack may have taken place? Monsieur Trabuc believes the approaching confinement of Monsieur van Gogh’s sister-in-law may have played a role, for Monsieur van Gogh has shown signs of anxiety over it. Monsieur Trabuc also reminds me that some of Monsieur van Gogh’s pictures are currently on exhibit in Brussels, and says that Monsieur van Gogh has been anxious over that as well.
I admit to being perplexed over this situation. Unlike most patients here, he can be lucid and normal one day, in misery the next, only to be lucid and normal once more as the attack passes. I suspect a form of epilepsy to be the cause but am confounded how he might be helped, or indeed if there is help for such a case. Just now Monsieur van Gogh seems to be improving, but for the past few days he has been unable to do any drawing or painting, and has answered incoherently any question put to him.
I trust this will pass as before, but as Monsieur van Gogh’s former physician, I would appreciate any insight you might offer into how such attacks may be prevented in future.
With regards,
Th. Peyron, Director
Maison de Santé de Saint-Rémy de Provence
30 January 1890
Dr. Théophile Peyron, Director
Maison de Santé de Saint-Rémy
de Provence
(Bouches-du-Rhône)
Dear Dr. Peyron,
What a disappointment to learn of Monsieur van Gogh’s latest crise. He did not come to see me during his visit here, and in fact I have not seen Monsieur van Gogh at all since my visit to Saint-Rémy in September. I am inclined to agree with Monsieur Trabuc that events in Monsieur van Gogh’s family or connected with this Brussels exhibition may have taxed his mental faculties to their limit.
While I hesitate to criticize your decision to let Monsieur van Gogh travel, perhaps he should not make any trips in the near future. Arles is not far from Saint-Rémy, and the journey is not strenuous, but these visits may only exacerbate his existing difficulties.
With regards,
Félix Rey, chef interne
Hospices civils de la Ville d’Arles
18 February 1890
Mlle. Rachel Courteau
c/o Mme. Virginie Chabaud
Rue du Bout d’Arles, no. 1
Arles-sur-Rhône
Ma petite Rachel,
I have splendid news. Theo will be submitting ten of my pictures to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris this March—ten! Our friend Paul Signac is on the hanging committee, and he will ensure everything is well displayed.
Theo was unable to attend the opening in Brussels because of my little nephew’s birth, but my friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec says my pictures make a fine effect. Everyone talks of them, especially the sunflowers. No word about any sales, but like Theo, Lautrec believes it a matter of time. The article Monsieur Aurier wrote about me last month, he says, has gotten much attention.
My dear girl, do you realize what all this could mean? It is almost too much, so that my head feels quite muddled, and I must rest my pen and take deep breaths to calm myself. How I am sure you will laugh, you who have said that good things would happen. As has Theo. A lucky man I am to know such faith from my brother and little wife-to-be.
I will close this letter, because my head is throbbing and I wish to lie down for a few minutes. It may only be the change of weather since a manner of springtime has come this week, but I rather think I am overwhelmed too. I hope to go to Arles soon, especially since I missed you during my brief visit a few weeks ago. If it weren’t for that blasted cold I caught after I came back, I’d have returned sooner.
With a kiss in thought,
Vincent
“I’m sorry, but I can’t see you anymore.”
I stared in the mirror above the fireplace in Madame Virginie’s parlor, took a deep breath, and tried again. “Félix, this is hard for me to say, but I can’t see you anymore.”
I should have done it long ago, after Vincent proposed marriage, but Félix’s money kept me quiet. Every time I counted the stash of coins and bills in my bureau drawer, I thought about what it could buy: new dishes, flowery wallpaper, seeds for planting a garden. I lay in my bed and imagined a farmhouse out the road to Tarascon—not one of those grand farmhouses with grand pillared gates but a simple cottage with thatched roof and blackened chimney. With a light-filled studio where Vincent would paint color-filled pictures, and a field of sunflowers nearby where our children could play.
Vincent’s letters fed my dreams even more than Félix’s money. Ever since that November visit, his words were charged with such hope, such faith that I hadn’t seen in him for a long time. Paragraph after paragraph about the new painting he’d done for the Brussels exhibition and how much Theo liked it, Theo’s certainty that sales would come, how strong and well he felt, an article written about him in Le Mercure de France. He sent me the article itself, and I wept with pride to read what the critic, Monsieur Aurier, had said about Vincent’s work. Now this announcement of a new exhibition.
A knock at the door of the parlor. “What’s the occasion, for us to meet in here?” Félix asked as he kissed me on each cheek. I was relieved to see he’d brought no flowers, no gift.
“I thought we needed a quiet place to talk.” I handed him a glass of cognac and gestured toward the settee before taking the armchair by the fireplace and folding my hands in my lap. Best do it quickly, before I changed my mind. “Félix, I can’t see you anymore.”
He stared at me wordlessly, then tossed back his drink in a way I’d never seen him do. He hunched over and stared at the floor. The look on his face…“This is difficult for me,” I said. “I’ve enjoyed your company, and I haven’t wanted to lose your friendship.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why now?”
“Vincent and I are engaged to be married. We have been since November.”
Félix pulled a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket and mopped his forehead. “Then why didn’t you tell me this in November?” I looked down at my hands and didn’t reply. “As if I don’t already know,” he added bitterly.
“F�
�lix…”
“I hoped you would come to care for me as you do for him. I should have known better.”
“I do care for you, please don’t think otherwise. Please don’t make this harder than it already is.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “I’ve risked much staying with you this long. Vincent found out ages ago.”
Félix’s eyes widened. “When?”
“I learned he knew the day we went to Saint-Rémy.”
“Merde.” I’d never heard Félix curse before. He reached for the bottle of cognac and poured himself another drink. “And he let you keep on? Did he tell you to keep seeing me?”
I didn’t like what Félix was hinting. “He absolutely did not. I’m certain he thinks I stopped seeing you.”
“If you’re engaged, why hasn’t he told you to leave Madame Virginie’s employ? What kind of man lets his fiancée—”
I fidgeted in the armchair. “It’s not that simple. We need money.”
“And I was the best way to get it.”
“Félix, please—”
“What makes you think he can look after you as a husband should?”
His tone made me wince. “Some of Vincent’s pictures are in an exhibition right now in Brussels, and he has every reason to think some of them will sell. He had an article written about him last month in a Paris journal, and next month he’ll be exhibiting more pictures in Paris. He’s strong and healthy, it’s been almost five months since his last crise—”
Félix took a swallow of cognac. “Rachel, Vincent has suffered two more crises in the past six weeks.” I felt the color drain from my face. “One began December twenty-third, the anniversary of his first collapse—”
“That’s not true, he wrote me that morning, he said he felt fine.”
“—the other was in late January after he came to Arles for a visit. Did he see you when he was here?”
I shook my head. “He came to visit Madame Ginoux, and when he stopped here, I’d gone out for a walk. I didn’t know he was coming, and he didn’t have time to wait.”
“Two days after that, he collapsed again. Both crises lasted about a week, so they were shorter than his previous attacks, but serious nonetheless.”
“He’s said nothing about any crise,” I protested. “He caught cold a couple of times and was too ill to write, but—”
“He’s been lying to you.”
I jumped to my feet. “How do I know you’re not lying to me?”
Félix pulled two letters from his pocket and handed them to me. “Suffered considerable despondency and tried once again to ingest his own paints…normal one day, in misery the next…I am confounded how he might be helped, if indeed there is help for such a case.” If indeed there is help. If indeed there is help…
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “To hurt me? To make me stay with you?”
“To warn you. So you would know fully what you are doing, if you choose to affiance yourself to this man.”
I shook Dr. Peyron’s pages at him. “You think this makes a difference?”
“It should. Please listen to me, before you make a tremendous mistake. Vincent—”
I crumpled the letters and threw them on the floor. “The mistake I’ve made is carrying on with you all this time. To think I felt sorry for you, when you only want to ruin everything.”
“That’s not true.” He rose from the settee and stepped toward me. “I care for you very deeply and want only what’s best for you.”
“Who are you to say what’s best for me?”
“Let me finish. I can’t let you go without saying that I would have been delighted—would be delighted—to give you a life of security beyond this place. A life that, no matter what you say, he can’t give you.”
“Please don’t—”
“My mother has an apartment that she rents. It’s empty now, and it can be yours. I’d pay the rent in your name, take care of you. Spoil you.” He smiled, but I didn’t smile in return. “You wouldn’t have to worry anymore. I’d look after you.”
“Until the time came for you to find a wife,” I said quietly. “Marry a suitable bourgeois girl, have suitable bourgeois children…. You can’t marry me, isn’t that so? Or would you keep me around to do the things your wife won’t?”
He flushed and straightened the front of his waistcoat. “Rachel, please.”
“Your mother would never allow the likes of me in your family. You wouldn’t be able to tell her I even exist. I’d be the girl you keep locked away for your amusement, no different than any other whore.”
“It wouldn’t be like that,” he said and took my hand. “You are correct that my position in society forbids me certain things, but I would always make sure you were taken care of.”
“Even after you throw me away?”
He dropped my hand. “It wouldn’t be like that,” he repeated.
“How else could it be?” I asked, as gently as I could manage. “I’m sorry, Félix. I love Vincent, and I am going to marry him. Nothing you or anyone else says will change that.”
We were silent then, Félix looking at me as if he hoped I would change my mind, me looking at him and wishing I’d never let myself be swayed by his money and his gifts. I’d played with all our lives in a way I’d had no right to do, and now I was paying for it.
“I should leave,” he finally said, reaching for his hat. “I don’t think there’s anything left to say.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I wish things had been different.”
He bent to kiss my cheek. “As disappointed as I am, it was my honor to spend many happy moments in your company. If there is anything you ever need from me, anything I can ever do for you, I hope you will call on me.”
After he left, I picked up Dr. Peyron’s letters from the floor, smoothed them open, and read them again. And cried.
Two days later, I received a note from Vincent, telling me that he would be arriving in Arles for an overnight visit the evening of the twenty-second. That evening. “I have asked Dr. Peyron for special permission to visit, for there is something I must tell you. It’s too important to discuss in a letter.”
I read and reread Dr. Peyron’s letters to Félix until I knew them by heart. I read Vincent’s old letters too, wondering if I’d missed some sign. “I am sorry for the delay in writing over the holiday,” he’d said just after the new year, “but working outdoors resulted in a cold…I have been laid up in bed unable to do much except sleep and read until today.” He’d lied to me, just as I’d lied to him by keeping Félix my secret. Could a marriage be built on secrets, on lies?
The clock on the landing struck eight. The train from Tarascon would be pulling into the station, Vincent would be climbing down the third-class compartment steps. Outside in the Rue du Bout d’Arles a band of Zouaves was singing some army song, on their way to find filles as jolly as they were. I’d begged off the night’s work with a headache and whispered to Minette to send Vincent upstairs when he arrived.
I heard his quick footsteps down the hall before his sharp raps on my door, and I stood to smooth my yellow dress. “I thought I’d find you in the salon,” he said when I let him in.
“I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of everyone,” I said with a weak smile and walked into his waiting arms. He was thin again. He’d been more filled out when I’d last seen him, but now he was thin again.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, peering into my eyes. “You look different.”
“I’ve missed you, that’s all. What’s that?” I nodded at a wrapped painting he’d leaned against the bureau.
“A present for Madame Ginoux. I’ll give it to her tomorrow morning, then I thought we’d take a walk out the road to Tarascon before I catch the train. We have to start looking for a house.” I stared and he said triumphantly, “I sold a painting in Brussels, the one with the red vineyard. Four hundred francs.”
I leaped back into his arms with a gleeful squeal. “Oh, Vincent! Oh, dearest!”<
br />
“It’s not enough to do everything I wanted,” he cautioned. “I can’t support myself on only that. But it’s a start.”
“Yes, and you have the exhibition next month, too!”
He took my hands in his and squeezed them tight. “Écoute, even if nothing sells at the Indépendants, I’ll tell Theo everything. Ask for his help so we can marry in the spring as we planned. I’m well and healthy, I’ll leave the hospital and we can—” My face must have betrayed me. “What is it?”
“Vincent, I know about the two crises.” His smile faded, and his eyes turned to ice. “Why did you hide it, mon cher? Before we go any further planning marriage—”
“What do you mean, ‘before we go any further’?”
“I mean, we need to talk about this. Why didn’t you—”
“He told you, didn’t he?”
Without meaning to, I glanced at the letters sitting on the bureau, where I’d forgotten to hide them. Vincent snatched them up and read them before ripping them into tiny pieces. “Are you still seeing him?” he asked, and I said nothing. “Answer me, damn it. Are you—”
“No. I broke it off.”
“When?”
I stared at the bits of fallen paper. “Two days ago.”
“You’ve been screwing the goddamn doctor all this time? After I—after we—” I groped for his arm, but he shook me off to pace the room. “You must have gotten a good price,” he sneered. “How much?”
“Vincent, please listen—”
“How much?” he shouted. At my whispered answer, he reached into his pocket and tossed coins on the bed. “You raised your fee. I only brought two francs.”
“It meant nothing, I swear! I took his money, that’s all, money I’ve been saving for us, Vincent—us!”
“So you can play Madame van Gogh the way you’ve played the little bourgeoise?” He grabbed the striped hatbox and waved the satin hat at me. “Is this what you sell yourself for? A fucking hat?”
“What did you expect me to do, starve while I wait for you?” Françoise’s words flew from my mouth. “I don’t have a brother in Paris sending me money!”
Vincent flung the hat to the floor and gripped my wrist until I gasped in pain. “Take that back!”
Sunflowers Page 26
