Lust for Life

A strange man entered the front door, looked at Lautrec, and sank into a chair in a far corner. Everyone waited for Lautrec to present him, but he just went on talking.

“Won’t you introduce your friend?” asked Vincent.

“That’s not my friend,” laughed Lautrec. “That’s my keeper.”

There was a moment of pained silence.

“Hadn’t you heard, Vincent? I was non compos mentis for a couple of months. They said it was from too much liquor, so now I’m drinking milk. I’ll send you an invitation to my next party. There’s a picture on it of me milking a cow from the wrong end!”

Johanna passed out refreshments. Everyone talked at the same time and the air grew thick with tobacco smoke. It reminded Vincent of the old Paris days. “How is Georges Seurat getting along?” Vincent asked Lautrec.

“Georges! Mean to tell me you don’t know about him?”

“Theo didn’t write anything,” said Vincent. “What is it?”

“Georges is dying of consumption. The doctor says he won’t last beyond his thirty-first birthday.”

“Consumption! Why, Georges was strong and healthy. How in the . . .?”

“Overwork, Vincent,” said Theo. “It’s been two years since you’ve seen him? Georges drove himself like a demon. Slept two and three hours a day, and worked himself furiously all the rest of the time. Even that good old mother of his couldn’t save him.”

“So Georges will be going soon,” said Vincent, musingly.

Rousseau came in, carrying a bag of home-made cookies for Vincent. Père Tanguy, wearing the same round straw hat, presented Vincent with a Japanese print and a sweet speech about how glad they were to welcome him back to Paris.

At ten o’clock Vincent insisted upon going down and buying a litre of olives. He made everyone eat them, even Lautrec’s guardian.

“If you could once see those silver-green olive groves in Provence,” he exclaimed, “you would eat olives for the rest of your life.”

“Speaking of olive groves, Vincent,” said Lautrec, “how did you find the Arlesiennes?”

The following morning Vincent carried the perambulator down to the street for Johanna so that the baby might have his hour of sunshine on the private trottoir. Vincent then went back to the apartment and stood about in his shirt sleeves, looking at the walls. They were covered with his pictures. In the dining room over the mantelpiece was the Potato Eaters, in the living room the Landscape from Arles, and Night View on the Rhône, in the bedroom, Blooming Orchards. To the despair of Johanna’s femme de ménage, there were huge piles of unframed canvases under the beds, under the sofa, under the cupboard, and stacked solid in the spare room.

While rummaging for something in Theo’s desk, Vincent came across large packages of letters tied with heavy cord. He was amazed to find that they were his own letters. Theo had carefully guarded every line his brother had written to him since that day, twenty years before, when Vincent had left Zundert for Goupils in The Hague. All in all, there were seven hundred letters. Vincent wondered why in the world Theo had saved them.

In another part of the desk he found the drawings that he had been sending to Theo for the past ten years, all ranged neatly in periods; here were the miners and their wives from the Borinage period, leaning over their terril: here the diggers and sowers in the fields near Etten; here the old men and women from the Hague, the diggers in the Geest, and the fishermen of Scheveningen; here the potato eaters and weavers of Nuenen; here the restaurants and street scenes of Paris; here the early sunflower and orchard sketches from Arles; and here the garden of the asylum at St. Remy.

“I’m going to have an exhibition all my own!” he exclaimed.

He took all the pictures off the walls, threw down the packages of sketches, and pulled piles of unframed canvases from under every piece of furniture. He sorted them out very carefully into periods. Then he selected the sketches and oils which best caught the spirit of the place in which he had been working. In the foyer, where one entered from the hallway of the house, he pinned up about thirty of his first studies, the Borains coming out of the mines, leaning over their oval stoves, eating supper in their little shacks.

“This is the charcoal room,” he announced to himself.

He looked about the rest of the house and decided that the bathroom was the next least important place. He stood on a chair and tacked a row of Etten studies about the four walls in a straight line, studies of the Brabant peasants.

“And this, of course, is the carpenter’s pencil room.”

His next selection was the kitchen. Here he put up his Hague and Scheveningen sketches, the view from his window over the lumber yard, the sand dunes, the fishing smacks being drawn up on the beach.

“Chamber three,” he said; “water-colour room.”