Lust for Life

“Good! Good! I will set up your easel. Paul, carry Monsieur Vincent’s easel into the garden. You will show us where you want it, and I will tell you if any other painter has done that exact spot.”

While Vincent worked, the doctor ran about him in little circles, gesticulating with rapture, consternation and amazement. He poured a constant stream of advice over Vincent’s shoulder, interspersed with hundreds of sharp exclamations.

“Yes, yes, you caught it that time. It’s crimson lake. Look out. You’ll spoil that tree. Ah, yes, yes, now you’ve caught it. No. No. No more cobalt. This isn’t Provence. Now I see. Yes, yes, its épatant. Careful. Careful. Vincent, put a little spot of yellow in that flower. Yes, yes, just so. How you make things live. There’s not a still life in your brush. No. No. I beg of you. Be careful. Not too much. Ah, yes, yes, now I catch it. Merveilleux!”

Vincent stood the doctor’s contortions and monologue as long as he could. Then he turned to the dancing Gachet and said, “My dear friend, don’t you think it bad for your health to get yourself so excited and wrought up? As a medical man, you should know how important it is to keep calm.”

But Gachet could not be calm when anyone was painting.

When he finished his sketch, Vincent went inside the house with Gachet, and showed him the portrait of the Arlesienne he had brought. The Doctor cocked one eye and looked at it quizzically. After a long and voluble discussion with himself as to its merits and faults, he announced,

“No, I cannot accept it. I cannot fully accept it. I do not see what you have tried to say.”

“I haven’t tried to say anything,” replied Vincent, “She is the synthesis of the Arlesiennes, if you like. I simply tried to interpret her character in terms of colours.”

“Alas,” said the doctor mournfully, “I cannot accept it.”

“Do you mind if I look about the house at your collection?”

“But of course, of course, go look your fill. I will stay here with this lady and see if I cannot come to accept her.”

Vincent browsed through the house for an hour, led from room to room by the obliging Paul. Thrown carelessly in one corner he found a Guillaumin, a nude woman lying on a bed. The canvas had obviously been neglected, and was cracking. While Vincent was examining it, Doctor Gachet came running up excitedly and poured out a string of questions about the Arlesienne.

“Do you mean to tell me you have been looking at her all this time?” demanded Vincent.

“Yes, yes, it is coming, it is coming, I am beginning to feel her.”

“Forgive my presumption, Doctor Gachet, But this is a magnificent Guillaumin. If you don’t have it framed soon, it will be ruined.”

Gachet did not even hear him.

“You say you followed Gauguin in the drawing . . . I do not agree . . . that clash of colours . . . it kills her femininity . . . no, not kills, but . . . well, well I will go look again . . . she is coming to me . . . slowly . . . slowly . . . she is jumping out of the canvas to me.”

Gachet spent the rest of the long afternoon running about the Arlesienne, pointing at her, waving his arms, talking to himself, asking and answering innumerable questions, falling into a thousand poses. By the time night fell, the woman had completely captured his heart. An exalted quiescence fell upon him.

“How difficult it is to be simple,” he remarked, standing in peaceful exhaustion before the portrait.

“Yes.”

“She is beautiful, beautiful. I have never felt such depth of character before.”

“If you like her. Doctor,” said Vincent, “she is yours. And so is the scene I did in the garden this afternoon.”

“But why should you give me these pictures, Vincent? They are valuable.”

“In the near future you may have to take care of me. T will have no money to pay you. So I pay you in canvases, instead.”

“But I would not be taking care of you for money, Vincent. I would be doing it for friendship.”

“Soit! I give you these pictures for friendship.”

3

VINCENT SETTLED DOWN once again to be a painter. He went to sleep at nine, after watching the labourers play billiards under a dull lamp in Ravoux’s café. He arose at five. The weather was beautiful, with gentle sunshine and the fresh verdancy of the valley. His periods of illness and enforced idleness in St. Paul had taken their toll; the paint brush slipped in his hand.

He asked Theo to send him Bargue’s sixth charcoal studies to copy, for he was afraid that if he did not study proportion and the nude again, he would be badly caught out. He looked about Auvers to see if he could find a little house in which he might settle permanently. He wondered if Theo had been right in thinking that, somewhere in the world, there was a woman who would share his life. He laid out a number of his St. Remy canvases, anxious to retouch and perfect them.

But his sudden activity was only a momentary gesture, the reflex of an organism that was yet too powerful to be destroyed.