The landlord left. Roulin went back to work. Vincent walked from one room to another, up and down the stairs again, surveying over and over every inch of his domain. Theo’s fifty francs had arrived just the day before; he still had some thirty francs in his pocket. He rushed out, bought a cheap mattress and a chair and carried them back to the yellow house. He decided that the room on the ground floor would be his bedroom, the top room his studio. He threw the mattress on the red tile floor, carried the chair up to his studio, and went back to his hotel for the last time.
The proprietor added forty francs to Vincent’s bill on some thin pretext. He retused to let Vincent have his canvases until the money was handed over. Vincent had to go to the police court to get his paintings back, and even then had to pay half the fictitious charge.
Late that afternoon he found a merchant who was willing to give him a small gas stove, two pots, and a kerosene lamp on credit. Vincent had three francs left. He bought coffee, bread, potatoes and a little meat for soup. He left himself without a centime. At home he set up a kitchen in the cabinet on the ground floor.
When night closed over the Place Lamartine and the yellow house, Vincent cooked his soup and coffee on the little stove. He had no table, so he spread a paper over the mattress, put out his supper, and ate it sitting cross-legged on the floor. He had forgotten to buy a knife and fork. He used the handle of his brush to pick the pieces of meat and potato out of the pot. They tasted slightly of paint.
When he finished eating, he took the kerosene lamp and mounted the red brick stairs to the second floor. The room was barren and lonely, with only the stark easel standing against the moonlit window. In the background was the dark garden of the Place Lamartine.
He went to sleep on the mattress. When he awakened in the morning he opened the windows and saw the green of the garden, the rising sun, and the road winding up into the town. He looked at the clean red bricks of the floor, the spotlessly whitewashed walls, the spaciousness of the rooms. He boiled himself a cup of coffee and walked about drinking from the pot, planning how he would furnish his house, what pictures he would hang on the walls, how he would pass the happy hours in a real home of his own.
The next day he received a letter from his friend Paul Gauguin, who was imprisoned, ill and poverty stricken, in a wretched cafe in Pont-Aven, in Brittany. “I can’t get out of this hole,” wrote Gauguin, “because I can’t pay my bill, and the owner has all my canvases under lock and key. In all the variety of distresses that humanity, nothing maddens me more than the lack of money. Yet I feel myself doomed to perpetual beggary.”
Vincent thought of the painters of the earth, harassed, ill, destitute, shunned and mocked by their fellow men, starved and tortured to their dying day. Why? What was their crime? What was their great offence that made them outcasts and pariahs? How could such persecuted souls do good work? The painter of the future—ah, he would be such a colourist and a man as had never yet existed. He would not live in miserable cafés, and go to the Zouave brothels.
And poor Gauguin. Rotting away in some filthy hole in Brittany, too sick to work, without a friend to help him or a franc in his pocket for wholesome food and a doctor. Vincent thought him a great painter and a great man. If Gauguin should die. If Gauguin should have to give up his work. What a tragedy for the painting world.
Vincent slipped the letter into his pocket, left the yellow house, and walked along the embankment of the Rhone. A barge loaded with coal was moored to the quay. Seen from above, it was all shining and wet from a shower. The water was of yellowish white, and clouded pearl grey. The sky was lilac, barred with orange to the west, the town violet. On the boat some labourers in dirty blue and white came and went, carrying the cargo on shore.
It was pure Hokusai. It carried Vincent back to Paris, to the Japanese prints in Père Tanguy’s shop . . . and to Paul Gauguin who, of all his friends, he loved the most dearly.
He knew at once what he had to do. The yellow house was large enough for two men. Each of them could have his own bedroom and studio. If they cooked their meals, ground their colours, and guarded their money, they could live on his hundred and fifty francs a month. The rent would be no more, the food very little. How marvellous it would be to have a friend again, a painter friend who talked one’s language and understood one’s craft. And what wonderful things Gauguin could teach him about painting.
He had not realized before how utterly lonely he had been. Even if they couldn’t live on Vincent’s hundred and fifty francs, perhaps Theo would send an extra fifty in return for a monthly canvas from Gauguin.
