The turbulence of the room, which fired Vincent to gesticulatory enthusiasm and eloquence, gave Theo a splitting headache. All this stridency was foreign to his nature. He was tremendously fond of the men in the room. Was it not for them he carried on his quiet, endless battle with Goupils? But he found the rough, uncouth clamour of their personalities alien to his nature. There was a good bit of the feminine in Theo. Toulouse-Lautrec, with his usual vitriolic humour, once remarked,
“Too bad Theo is Vincent’s brother. He would have made him such a splendid wife.”
Theo found it just as distasteful to sell Bouguereaus as it would have been for Vincent to paint them. And yet, if he sold Bouguereau, Valadon would let him exhibit Degas. One day he would persuade Valadon to let him hang a Cezanne, then a Gauguin or a Lautrec, and finally, some distant day, a Vincent Van Gogh . . .
He took one last look at the noisy, quarrelsome, smoke laden room, slipped out of the front door unnoticed, and walked up the Butte where, alone, he gazed at the lights of Paris spread out before him.
Gauguin was arguing with Cezanne. He waved a hard-boiled egg and a brioche in one hand, a glass of beer in the other. It was his boast that he was the only man in Paris who could drink beer with a pipe in his mouth.
“Your canvases are cold, Cezanne,” he shouted. “Ice cold. It freezes me just to look at them. There’s not an ounce of emotion in all the miles of canvas you’ve flung paint at.”
“I don’t try to paint emotion,” retorted Cezanne. “I leave that to the novelists. I paint apples and landscapes.”
“You don’t paint emotion because you can’t. You paint with your eyes, that’s what you paint with.”
“What does anyone else paint with?”
“With all sorts of things.” Gauguin took a quick look about the room. “Lautrec, there, paints with his spleen. Vincent paints with his heart. Seurat paints with his mind, which is almost as bad as painting with your eyes. And Rousseau paints with his imagination.”
“What do you paint with, Gauguin?”
“Who me? I don’t know. Never thought about it.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Lautrec. “You paint with your genital!”
When the laugh on Gauguin died down, Seurat perched himself on the arm of a divan and cried, “You can sneer at a man painting with his mind, but it’s just helped me discover how we can make our canvases doubly effective.”
“Do I have to listen to the
“Shut up, Cezanne! Gauguin, sit down somewhere and don’t clutter up the whole room. Rousseau, stop telling that infernal story about your admirer. Lautrec, throw me an egg. Vincent, can I have a brioche? Now listen, everybody!”
“What’s up, Seurat? I haven’t seen you so excited since that fellow spat on your canvas at the Salon des Refusées!”
“Listen! What is painting today? Light. What kind of light? Gradated light. Points of colour flowing into each other . . .”
“That’s not painting, that’s pointillism!”
“For God’s sake, Georges, are you going intellectual on us again?”
“Shut up! We get through with a canvas. Then what do we do? We turn it over to some fool who puts it into a hideous gold frame and kills our every last effect. Now I propose that we should never let a picture out of our hands until we’ve put it into a frame and painted the frame so that it becomes an integral part of the picture.”
“But, Seurat, you’re stopping too soon. Every picture must be hung in a room. And if the room is the wrong colour, it will kill the picture and frame both.”
“That’s right, why not paint the room to match the frame?”
“A good idea,” said Seurat.
“What about the house the room is in?”
“And the city that the house is in.”
“Oh, Georges, Georges, you do get the damndest ideas!”
“That’s what comes from painting with your brain.”
“The reason you imbeciles don’t paint with your brains is that you haven’t any!”
“Look at Georges’s face, everybody. Quick! We got the scientist riled up that time, all right.”
“Why do you men always fight among yourselves?” demanded Vincent. “Why don’t you try working together?”
“You’re the communist of this group,” said Gauguin. “Suppose you tell us what we’d get if we worked together?”
