The Strange Death of Vincent van Gogh

by Ted Morgan

  In forcing his friendship with Dr. Gachet to the breaking point, Vincent was following a familiar pattern. With Gauguin, he had formed a close friendship; then, without warning, and without reason, he had attacked him. The result of this complicated process of guilt and unrealized aggression was that he had turned the violence against himself, cutting off his ear. Gachet’s reaction to Vincent’s outburst was like Gauguin’s: He avoided him.

  Vincent’s next letter to Theo was distraught and partly incoherent. “I myself am also trying to do as well as I can,” he wrote, “but I will not conceal from you that I hardly dare count on being always in good health. And if my disease returns, you would forgive me.” He was warning Theo that his decline had already begun. “I still love art and life very much,” he went on, but never “having a wife of my own, I have no great faith in that. I rather fear that toward say forty - or rather say nothing - I declare to know nothing, absolutely nothing as to what turn this may take.” One wonders what prompted this sudden talk of marriage. Was Vincent thinking of Theo’s family situation, or were his thoughts of marriage prompted by Dr. Gachet’s daughter, Marguerite?

  On July 5, Theo wrote that his son was out of danger and asked Vincent to visit them on the following day, a Sunday. The atmosphere must have been tense, the baby still sick and Theo still quarreling with his employers and afraid of losing his job. Was something said about the burden of supporting Vincent? The slightest hint, a random remark expressed in a moment of impatience, would have been enough to unsettle Vincent in his already nervous and sensitized state. Whatever was said, Vincent’s anxiety was evident in the first letter he wrote Theo and Jo after his final Paris visit. “I myself am far from having reached any kind of tranquility,” he said. “I very much fear that I, too, was distressed, and I think it strange that I do not in the least know under what conditions I left - if it is at 150 francs a month paid in three installments as before. Theo fixed nothing, and so to begin with, I left in confusion. Would there be a way of seeing each other again more calmly? . . .

  “I have an interest in my little nephew and am anxious for his well-being since you were good enough to call him after me. I should like him to have a soul less unquiet than mine, which is foundering.”

  In this letter, Vincent once again revealed his constant preoccupation: Was Theo going to continue to support him, to send him fifty-franc notes folded into his letters? And if he was, would Vincent not be diverting resources from his infant nephew and namesake? There was no solution.

  At the same time, the other anchor in his life, Dr. Gachet, had abandoned him. Vincent’s letter went on: “Now about Dr. Gachet. I went to see him the day before yesterday, I did not find him in. . . . I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all, he is sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much, so that’s that. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both fall into the ditch?” The friend who had understood him perfectly, who had started him working again, was now a blind man who could not find his way and who threatened to drag Vincent down with him.

  In response to a reassuring message from Jo that their situation had improved, both with regard to little Vincent’s health and Theo’s job, Vincent wrote: “Jo’s letter was really like a gospel to me, a deliverance from the agony which had been caused by the hours I had shared with you, which were a bit too difficult and trying for us all. It was no slight thing when we all felt our daily bread was in danger, no slight thing when for reasons other than that we felt that our means of subsistence were fragile.

  “Back here, I still felt very sad and continued to feel the storm which threatens you weighing on me, too. What was to be done - you see, I generally try to be fairly cheerful, but my life is also threatened at the very root, and my steps are also wavering.

  “I feared - not altogether but yet a little - that being a burden to you, you felt me to be rather a thing to be dreaded, but Jo’s letter proves to me clearly that you understood that for my part I am as much in toil and trouble as you are. . . . I have painted three more big canvases. They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness.”

  Vincent, so he said, was delivered from his suffering by Jo’s letter, and now he went back to work, painting more sweeping landscapes, as well as the flag-covered Auvers town hall on July 14 and the funereal Wheatfield with Crows. The last letter he sent Theo, dated July 23, avoided the subject of his emotional state and dealt with his work and practical matters like obtaining paints.

  On Sunday evening, July 27, 1890, the Ravoux family, monsieur and madame and their two young daughters, sat down to dinner with all their boarders but Vincent, who was usually punctual at meals. They were taking the air outside the cafe in the warm summer evening when Vincent passed them and climbed the twisting staircase to his whitewashed room. Adeline Ravoux, whose portrait Vincent had once painted, could still remember the scene in vivid detail more than sixty years later. “It was so dark only my mother noticed he was holding his side like a man in pain,” she recalled in a 1953 interview for the Paris literary weekly Les Nouvelles Littéraires. “She said to my father: You’d better have a look, I don’t think . . . Vincent is well.”

  Through the door of Vincent’s room, Ravoux could hear him moan. The door was locked. When Ravoux let himself in, Vincent showed him a red stain on his shirt. “But what have you done?” M. Ravoux asked. “I’ve shot myself. I only hope this time I’ve succeeded,” Vincent replied.

  Ravoux sent for Dr. Mazery, who came twice a week to Auvers to attend to the villagers, but he was not at home. Someone went to get Dr. Gachet, who had just returned from a day of fishing with his son on the Oise River. He arrived with his emergency medical bag, and being an advocate of electric shock treatment, his little electric coil.

  The Ravoux had never met Dr. Gachet before. “He did not practice in Auvers and had never come to our house,” Adeline Ravoux said in her interview. “When he arrived we had the impression that he . . . and Vincent did not know one another. . . . My father always maintained that they never exchanged the slightest word.”

  Dr. Gachet examined Vincent’s wound by candlelight. He saw that Vincent had shot himself too low and too far to the side to touch the heart. The wound, at the edge of the left side of his rib cage, formed a small, dark red circle, surrounded by a purple halo. A thin stream of blood came from it. No vital organ seemed to be affected. The bullet appeared to have stopped somewhere in Vincent’s back, probably near the spinal column.

  Vincent, unlike a man suffering from a serious chest wound, did not seem to be in a state of shock. Lucid and composed, he sat up in bed and asked if he could smoke, pointing to his pipe and tobacco in a pocket of his blue blouse. It was out of the question for Dr. Gachet to try to extract the bullet. He had only candlelight to operate by, and surgery of the thorax was, in any case, fairly crude.

  The obvious thing to do was to hospitalize Vincent, if only to prevent him from doing further damage to himself. The town of Pontoise, which had a hospital, was less than six miles away. But Dr. Gachet did not do the obvious. After dressing the wound, he left Vincent in his airless room. Anton Hirschig, a Dutch painter who was also staying at the boarding house, visited Vincent’s deathbed and reported: “It was swelteringly hot up there under the roof.”

  Later that night, two gendarmes arrived to question Vincent. Adeline Ravoux recalled in her interview that Vincent would not answer their questions. “What I have done is nobody else’s business,” he said. “I am free to do what I like with my own body.” The gendarmes were unable to learn where Vincent had gone to shoot himself or how he had come into possession of a gun.

  When Dr. Gachet had asked for Theo’s current address in Paris, Vincent had refused to give it to him, but the doctor managed to send Theo a note via an art dealer: “I am terribly sorry to trouble your rest. However, I feel it is my duty to write you immediately. I was summoned at nine o�
��clock at night . . . Sunday by your brother Vincent. When I came to him, I found him very badly off. He has shot himself.”

  Theo arrived the morning of July 28 and Vincent told him: “Don’t cry, I did it for the good of all of us.” When he saw Vincent sitting up in bed calmly pulling on his pipe, Theo hoped he would recover. Thus, no more was done to save Vincent, who died in Theo’s arms at one-thirty on the morning of July 29, some twenty-eight and a half hours after Dr. Gachet had been to see him.

  Dr. Gachet did a deathbed charcoal drawing of Vincent, signed with his pseudonym, Van Ryssel. Vincent’s body was placed in a coffin that had been lifted onto the Ravoux billiard table, and he was buried on July 30 in a corner of the Auvers cemetery. Dr. Gachet spoke, but his words were drowned in his own sobs. After the funeral, according to Adeline Ravoux, “Theo asked Dr. Gachet to take the remaining paintings. He didn’t have to be asked twice, and with his son’s help, he rolled up canvas after canvas.”

  Dr. Gachet had written Theo that Vincent had asked for him, which was untrue. He had been called because the first doctor, Mazery, was not at home. In any case, he did nothing to save Vincent. Although he called himself a specialist in nervous diseases, nothing in his behavior suggests that he understood that a bungled suicide is a cry for help. He left Vincent to die in his garret room, grossly underestimating the gravity of his wound and not bothering to have him hospitalized, an act of negligence that would at best be called malpractice. And once Vincent was dead, he threw himself into the role of the grieved friend and gathered up Vincent’s canvases with greedy dispatch. All in all, Dr. Gachet leaves a distasteful impression.

  We should not, however, accept Artaud’s view of Gachet as “the direct, efficient, and sufficient cause” of Van Gogh’s death. It seems clear that we are dealing here with two unbalanced men. One was the patient, the other, unfortunately, was the doctor.

  When Vincent became angry over the unframed Guillaumin, Dr. Gachet abandoned his patient. A mercurial, often thoughtless person, perhaps Gachet did not realize how grave it is for a doctor to ignore the person he is supposed to be helping. If he did realize how dependent Vincent was on him, his neglect of his patient was criminal - in the moral if not the legal sense. In any case, it is a fact that at the moment Vincent was taking upon himself all of Theo’s problems, Dr. Gachet was divesting himself of Vincent.

  If we are to believe Marc-Edo Tralbaut, who has devoted his life to the study of the painter and who personally knew Dr. Gachet’s son and daughter, Vincent had formed an attachment to Dr. Gachet’s daughter and was told by the doctor that he must stop seeing Marguerite. When Vincent brought up the topic of marriage in his letter to Theo, he was thinking of Marguerite and his last chance to start a family - only to be rebuffed by her father, a man he considered his friend and helper. When I talked to Tralbaut, he told me that he believed Marguerite Gachet had returned Vincent’s feelings. He said he had been told by a girlhood friend of Marguerite’s “that she had fallen in love with Van Gogh.”

  All this is impossible to verify. We do know, however, that Marguerite Gachet suffered a serious depression after Vincent’s death, that she never married, and that she lived as a recluse in Auvers, where even her own neighbors seldom saw her.

  We also know that when Dr. Gachet came to Vincent’s side on July 27, he was no longer a friend. The two men, according to Adeline Ravoux, did not exchange a single word. Whatever there was between them, be it Marguerite or simply an accumulation of mutual ill will between two unstable men, died with Vincent. Dr. Gachet would not discuss it.

  Vincent left Theo three things: his Auvers paintings and drawings, many of which Theo gave to Dr. Gachet; an unmailed letter found on his person, in which Vincent said, “I tell you again that I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which will retain their calm even in the catastrophe. . . . Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it”; and his madness. Without Vincent as a mediator, Theo’s mind snapped. It was as if the true nature of their pact had been that Theo assumed the financial burdens for both brothers while Vincent dealt with their demons. So interwoven were their lives that it was not only his own mental balance that Vincent was struggling to keep, it was Theo’s as well.

  Theo remained on excellent terms with Dr. Gachet. It never crossed Theo’s mind that Dr. Gachet was in any way responsible for his brother’s death; in fact, Theo and Johanna still considered Gachet the Van Gogh family doctor.

  On October 10, 1890, almost two and a half months after Vincent’s death, Dr. Gachet received a letter from Johanna Van Gogh’s brother: “Since yesterday, my brother-in-law Van Gogh has been in a state of overexcitement that has us seriously worried. . . . The overexcitement is due to a quarrel with his employers, as the result of which he wants to set himself up independently without delay. The memory of his brother haunts him to such a point that he quarrels with all those who disagree with him.”

  Two days later, with Dr. Gachet’s consent, Theo was committed to a private asylum, the Maison Dubois, at 200 Faubourg Saint-Denis. He improved and was allowed to go to Holland and see his family. But the illness had attacked his body as well as his mind, and he died in Utrecht of general paralysis on January 25, 1891, at the age of thirty-three. He was buried there, but his body was later exhumed and reburied in Auvers beside his brother’s. Their remains lie under identical tombstones, as close as their psyches had been in life.

  Dr. Gachet continued practicing and exhibiting his canvases, signed Van Ryssel, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. He took part in a signboard contest, submitting a picture of a pig for a charcuterie. He died in 1909 at the age of eighty.

  Published by New Word City LLC, 2014

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