“I don’t know, Roulin. I gave up thinking about that sort of thing when I became interested in my work. But this life seems so incomplete, doesn’t it? Sometimes I think that just as trains and carriages are means of locomotion to get us from one place to another on this earth, so typhoid and consumption are means of locomotion to get us from one world to another.”
“Ah, you think of things, you artists.”
“Roulin, will you do me a favour? Let me paint your portrait. The people of Aries won’t pose for me.”
“I should be honoured, Monsieur. But why do you want to paint me. I am not an ugly man.”
“If there were a God, Roulin, I think he would have a beard and eyes just like yours.”
“You are making fun of me, Monsieur!”
“On the contrary, I am in earnest.”
“Will you come and share supper with us tomorrow night? We have a very plain board, but we will be happy to have you.”
Madame Roulin proved to be a peasant woman who reminded him a little of Madame Denis. There was a red and white checked cloth on the table, a little stew with potatoes, home-baked bread and a bottle of sour wine. After dinner Vincent sketched Madame Roulin, chatting with the postman as he worked.
“During the Revolution I was a republican,” said Roulin, “but now I see that we have gained nothing. Whether our rulers be kings or ministers, we poor people have just as little as before. I thought when we were a republic everyone would share and share alike.”
“Ah, no, Roulin.”
“All my life I have tried to understand, Monsieur, why one man should have more than the next, why one man should work hard while his neighbour sits by in idleness. Perhaps I am too ignorant to understand. Do you think if I were educated, Monsieur, I would be able to understand that better?”
Vincent glanced up quickly to see if Roulin were being cynical. There was the same look of naive innocence on his face.
“Yes, my friend,” he said, “most educated people seem to understand that state of affairs very well. But I am ignorant like you, and I shall never be able to understand or accept it.”
HE ROSE AT four in the morning, walked three and four hours to reach the spot he wanted, and then painted until dark. It was not pleasant, this trudging ten or twelve kilometres home on a lonely road, but he liked the reassuring touch of the wet canvas under his arm.
He did seven large pictures in seven days. By the end of the week he was nearly dead with work. It had been a glorious summer, but now he was painted out. A violent mistral arose and raised clouds of dust which whitened the trees. Vincent was forced to remain quiet. He slept for sixteen hours at a stretch.
He had a very thin time of it, for his money ran out on Thursday, and Theo’s letter with the fifty francs was not expected until Monday noon. It was not Theo’s fault. He still sent fifty francs every ten days in addition to all the painting supplies. Vincent had been wild to see his new pictures in frames, and had ordered too many of them for his budget. During those four days he lived on twenty-three cups of coffee and a loaf of bread for which the baker trusted him.
An intense reaction set in against his work. He did not think his pictures worthy of the goodness he had had from Theo. He wanted to win back the money he had already spent in order to return it to his brother. He looked at his paintings one by one and reproached himself that they were not worth what they had cost. Even if a tolerable study did come out of it from time to time, he knew that it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.
All during the summer ideas for his work had come to him in swarms. Although he had been solitary, he had not had time to think or feel. He had gone on like a steam-engine. But now his brain felt like stale porridge, and he did not even have a franc to amuse himself by eating or going to visit Rachel. He decided that everything he had painted that summer was very, very bad.
“Anyway,” he said to himself, “a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.”
He had the conviction that simply by staying in Aries he would set his individuality free. Life was short. It went fast. Well, being a painter, he still had to paint.
“These painter’s fingers of mine grow supple,” he thought, “even though the carcass is going to pieces.”
He drew up a long list of colours to send to Theo. Suddenly he realized that not one colour on his list would be found on the Dutch palette, in Mauve, Maris, or Weissenbruch. Arles had made his break with the Dutch tradition complete.
When his money arrived on Monday, he found a place where he could get a good meal for a franc. It was a queer restaurant, altogether grey; the floor was of grey bitumen like a street pavement, there was grey paper on the walls, green blinds always drawn, and a big green curtain over the door to keep the dust out. A very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight stabbed through a blind.
