Van Gogh (140 page)

AT ALMOST THE
same time, four hundred miles to the north, Theo had wallpaper on his mind, too. “I am enclosing a few samples of the wallpaper they’re putting up for us,” he reported to Jo as the hectic redecoration of their new apartment progressed, “although you do need to see it all in order to judge whether it’s suitable.” Only a few days before, he had sent samples of the “divine curtains” he had planned for the dining room. “People who like plush and satin would think them vulgar,” he warned, “but anyone with a sense of color would find them gorgeous.”

After a month of welcoming Vincent’s delusional reassurances and ignoring the many unspoken signals of his brother’s deterioration, Theo was startled by the latest news from Arles. That Vincent had been seized by police and forcibly confined horrified him especially. He omitted that part of Salles’s report in his letter to Jo the same day. “Poor poor fellow, how hard his life is,” he wrote. “What a sorry state of affairs, don’t you agree, dearest. I know you will also be very concerned and that’s a comfort to me.” He shared with Jo the question (raised by Salles) whether Vincent should be sent to an asylum in Provence or Paris, but used it only as a prelude to a full-throated defense of his brother as a misunderstood Byronic hero:

The letter soon wandered off into the beauties of art, especially Monet (whose show had just opened on the
entresol
), and a strange rumination on death, triggered by a Rodin sculpture, also in the show, depicting the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The saint’s head, Theo said, “bears a striking resemblance to Vincent.… That furrowed and contorted brow betraying a life of reflection and asceticism.” Like Vincent contemplating a portrait of his look-alike, Bruyas, Theo saw both his brother and himself in Rodin’s image of mortality. “Death has left no sign of anguish on that face nor an aura of eternal peace,” he wrote. “It has retained an air of tranquility and also an energetic concern with the future.”

Over the next week, while Vincent weathered the storms of darkness in a stupor of isolation, Theo’s thoughts stayed fixed on the “difficult matter” of decorating the apartment. At one point he sent a telegram to Dr. Rey requesting an update, but he left unanswered Salles’s urgent call for Vincent to be removed to Paris. “Your brother should be watched continuously and should have the special attention which he can only receive in a mental hospital or in the family,” the parson had written a week before. “Let me know whether you want him near you.” Salles had even arranged for Vincent’s loyal charwoman to accompany him on the long journey. “In any case, we must make a quick decision,” he pressed; “we will not do anything until we have heard from you.”

But before Theo had to decide, Rey telegraphed a reprieve of good news: “Vincent much improved, pending recovery we will look after him here, do not worry for the time being.” A few days later, Vincent himself wrote, reporting his provisional (daylight only) return to the Yellow House and dismissing his affliction, yet again, as a mere “fever of the region.” “You must not think too much about me, nor fret yourself,” he wrote. “We cannot change much in our fate.” Theo forwarded Vincent’s reassuring letter to Jo (noting “he’s on the right track”), along with samples of the wallpaper for the dining room.

F
IVE DAYS LATER, THE POLICE DESCENDED ON THE YELLOW HOUSE AGAIN
and dragged Vincent away. He was too drunk to resist. This time, they closed the shutters, padlocked the door, and pasted official seals over it—as if they expected him never to return.

As Vincent suspected, the neighbors had indeed poisoned him. Not with potions or spells, but with a secret petition to the authorities. “The Dutch subject named Vood,” they wrote, mangling his name, “has for some time and on several occasions furnished proof that he is not in full possession of his mental faculties.… He no longer knows either what he does or what he says.” Because of Vincent’s “excitement” and “instability,” they said, they lived in fear, especially for their women and children. “In the name of public security,” they demanded that Vincent be either “returned to his family as soon as possible,” or committed to a mental asylum, “in order to prevent whatever misfortune which will certainly occur one day if vigorous measures are not taken.”

Thirty of his neighbors had signed the petition—an overwhelming number. Their extraordinary protest represented the crest of a wave that had been building almost from the day Vincent arrived in Arles. Even before the events of Christmas, children had teased and badgered “the queer painter,” as one of them later called him. After the calamities of December, adults, too, shunned and scorned him. When he passed in the street, they tapped their heads and muttered to each other
“fada”
—Midi dialect for “crazy.” The brothel whores dubbed him
“fou roux”
—the mad redhead. His stalking gait, fluttering eyelashes, tirades of Dutch, and stuttering attempts at the local patois, all began to assume an alarming aspect.

Derision turned quickly to suspicion and fear in a community that still believed in demonic possession. His second hospitalization in February only corroded
civility further. Children threw stones now, not scraps of food. Vincent added fuel to the fire with drunken disdain for his antagonists, dismissing their fears as “absurdities” and them as superstitious provincials. Convinced that their backward prejudices against painters demanded a firm response, he hurled their taunts back at them. They had already done their worst, he said. “Where can I go that’s worse than where I have twice been: the isolation cell?” A simmering dispute with his landlord (who owned other properties in the area) may have galvanized the neighbors into official action. By the end of February, Vincent had to send his charwoman on errands rather than venture into the street himself.

Once the petition was filed, months of rumor and private rancor boiled into public view. The chief of police, who had no doubt already identified Vincent as a troublemaker after his dispute with the innkeeper Carrel the year before, sent gendarmes door to door collecting testimonies to support the allegations in the petition (in the officialese of the mayor’s order, “to establish the degree of Van Goghe’s [sic] madness”). The witnesses (identified only by age, sex, and trade) poured a heady mix of fact, hearsay, and suspicion into the record. They reported that Vincent chased after children in the street with the intent of “doing them harm,” that he drank too much, and that his speech rambled incoherently.

One woman, a dressmaker, complained of being “grabbed by the waist and lifted into the air.” Others reported more generally that they had seen Vincent “indulging in touching women who live in the neighborhood” and “permitting himself to fondle them.” One accused him of “making obscene remarks in the presence” of women. The grocer who shared the Yellow House, François Crevoulin, described how Vincent would “come into my store, insult my clients and touch women.” More than one witness reported that Vincent had followed women home—even entered their houses—so that they felt “no longer safe.” Mostly, they filled their affidavits with the verdict of the mob: cries of “lunatic” and “madman,” diagnoses of “derangement,” declarations of “public danger,” and demands that he be “confined in a special institution,” or simply “locked up.”

From the familiar confines of the Hôtel Dieu, Vincent lashed out at his accusers in a letter to Theo. “What a staggering blow between the eyes it was to find so many people here cowardly enough to band themselves together against one man,” he stormed, “and a sick one at that.” He called them “meddlesome idiots” and “poisonous idlers”—a “pack of skunks and cowards” bent only on his undoing. He demanded, and may have received, a hearing before the mayor or other official in which he could make all the arguments that swirled in his head—a lifetime of arguments against the prejudices and conspiracies that forever thwarted him. He insisted that the events of December had been exaggerated, and mocked those who suggested that he posed a danger to anyone but himself.

As for the strange behavior detailed in the petition, he claimed that he had been provoked by his accusers. “I would have remained more calm,” he argued, “if the police had protected my liberty by preventing the children and even grown-ups from collecting round my lodgings and climbing up to my window as they have done (as if I were a strange animal).” Any other man would have taken a pistol and shot the “gawking idiots” dead, he cried. Turning the tables on his tormenters, he demanded reparations for the troubles they had caused him. “If these fellows here protest against me, I protest against them,” he countered, “and all they have to do is to give me damages and interest … to pay me back what I have lost through their blunders and ignorance.”

Claiming the mantle of martyrdom, he compared himself to heroes like Victor Hugo, condemned by a “mischievous opposition” to suffer calumny, imprisonment, or worse, as an “eternal example” to future generations. Whatever he had done, he said, he had done for the new art, which he called “the first and last cause of my aberration.” And if that brought him pain or indignity at the hands of fools and cowards, so be it. “An artist is a man
at work
,” he declared defiantly, “and it is not for the first idler who comes along to crush him for good.” Besides, he added, “All this stir will ultimately be good for ‘impressionism.’ ”

Vincent’s feelings of betrayal and martyrdom were only sharpened when his doctors refused to come to his defense. From the beginning, he had agreed with Pastor Salles that “it should be the doctors and not the superintendent of police who ought to be the judges in a case like this.” But Vincent’s sudden, violent relapses had left all the doctors at the Hôtel Dieu confused and cautious. They could not agree on a diagnosis—they talked of cancer one minute, epilepsy the next—and dared not predict when or if his attacks would return. One of them, a Doctor Delon, had already provided the police with a report attesting to Vincent’s “mental alienation” and supporting the petition to have him removed from the community. Not even Rey, who considered it “an act of cruelty to permanently lock up a man who has done nobody any harm,” according to Salles, would contradict the official finding that Vincent constituted a potential “public danger.” In any event, there was little the young intern could do against a determined police chief, an angry landlord, a pusillanimous mayor, and a fearful citizenry.

Over his enraged objections, Vincent spent the next month, from February 25 to March 23, in the Hôtel Dieu—almost all of that time “under lock and key,” alone in an observation chamber. If anything, his indignation proved his undoing.
The more furiously he raged against the injustice of his confinement, the more he confirmed the verdict of “dangerous lunatic.” He learned the hard way that even in isolation his jailers could punish him. They took away not just his flask, but his pipe and tobacco, too. He was not allowed even a book or a breath of fresh air. Salles brought him some paints and brushes from the Yellow House, but these “made him wild,” the pastor reported, and were quickly removed. “I
miss
the work,” he noted bleakly. “The work takes my mind off things, or rather keeps me in order.” For weeks, he wrote no one, and no one wrote him. Except for Salles’s rare visits, he had no company other than the doctors who “gnawed at” him like “wasps on a fruit,” he said. Yet he had no privacy, either. Day and night, he was always watched.