Leaving Van Gogh

Five





VINCENT WORKED almost exclusively in oils when he was with us. He made some pencil drawings while he was in Auvers, but he was first and foremost a colorist. Yet he was always curious about other ways of making images. One day, not long after he painted my portrait, we were in my studio looking at the etchings Cézanne had made back in 1873. Among them was a little sketch, very precious to me, of Cézanne preparing the copper plate for an etching while I look on. Pissarro had drawn it on a scrap of black-edged letter paper he’d found in my drawer, left over, I suppose, from the period of mourning after Blanche’s death. The black border lends a strange emphasis to an informal record of a collaboration.

“So the three of you made etchings together?” Vincent asked.

“On several occasions,” I confirmed. “You can imagine what a challenge it was for Cézanne to think about line instead of color. He was painting almost entirely with the palette knife in those days, in blocks of color, so he had to proceed very differently.” I leafed through the little prints in the folder, and pulled out one of the painter Armand Guillaumin, seated somewhat awkwardly on the ground. It had a certain freshness but was undeniably clumsy.

“Yes,” Vincent agreed. “You can see here, on the shoulder, that the line is quite tentative.”

“Mind you, it’s not a simple process. First you have to remember that your image is going to be reversed. Then you also have to pull the needle through the varnish on the plate. If it’s been correctly prepared, the resistance is consistent, but when the three of us were working together back then, Cézanne was a novice. He might have been using a plate that he’d covered himself, as you see in the drawing. Then the needle would have moved slower or faster depending on how evenly the varnish had been applied.”

Vincent glanced at the small press that took up rather too much of the space in the studio. I had not used it in some time, and there were stacks of paper and boxes of charcoal piled on it.

“Could we try it?” he asked. “Perhaps I could make a series of etchings after my own works, for sale.”

“Of course we could.” I moved to lift the clutter from the bed of the press. “In the cabinet near the window you will find some copper plates,” I told him, pointing. “I think there are several sizes. We’ll start with something small.” He followed my instructions and brought out a clean copper plate. I had a moment’s qualm; the waxy varnish would require heating before we could paint it onto the plate. The fastest way to heat it would be on the stove, but Madame Chevalier would not be pleased to see us entering her kitchen.

Vincent evidently shared my trepidation, for as we went down the stairs, burdened with the etcher’s equipment, he said to me in a low voice, “I would not want to be in your housekeeper’s way. Perhaps we can work in the garden?”

“Absolutely. But we must melt the varnish on the stove. Here.” I handed him the needles, the rags, and the sealed vial of acid. “The acid is terribly strong, so be careful with it.”

Madame Chevalier was sitting at the table peeling a large pile of potatoes when I pushed through the door into the kitchen. “May I help you, Doctor?”

“I don’t want to disturb you,” I said, “but Monsieur Vincent asked if I could show him how to etch, and I must warm the varnish for the plate. May I just put it on the stove?”

She stood, as I had known she would, and pushed the metal bowl a few centimeters back from where I had placed it on the stove’s surface. Over the years she had become a master at communicating without resorting to words. This little gesture demonstrated to me that she was mistress of the stove top, not I. “What were you planning to use to stir this with, Doctor?”

I looked into the bowl, where the black substance was turning liquid around the edges. “Not one of my spoons!” she warned me as I lifted a hand toward the jug of implements next to the stove. I sighed and went back up the stairs to my studio, to find an appropriate brush.

Later, while Vincent was carefully stroking the black varnish onto the plate, Madame Chevalier surprised me by coming out the kitchen door with a pitcher and glasses on a tray. She set it down on the nearby bench, saying, “Here is some mint syrup, gentlemen. I thought you might be feeling the heat.” She straightened up and looked at the two of us. “Monsieur Vincent, would you like to wear one of the doctor’s hats? The sun is very strong.”

“You are very kind, Madame Chevalier,” he answered, “but after my time in the South, I barely feel your northern sun. Thank you anyway.”

She nodded sharply and stumped back into the house.

“Madame Chevalier does not usually coddle my guests,” I commented to Vincent. “She must have taken a liking to you.”

“She terrified me the first day I visited here. When she opened the gate, she looked so fierce that I almost ran off down the street.”

“She is inclined to be protective of us. Apparently she now considers you one of the family. I am afraid that means she will nag you to eat.”

“Do you think she would pose for me, Doctor? I love to paint those older ladies with their determined faces. And her coloring is so interesting.”

I had never noticed Madame Chevalier’s coloring before. Now that it was pointed out to me, I realized that her ruddy face and bright blue eyes were, indeed, striking. I wondered how Vincent would render them. “I expect she will tell you that she does not have enough time to sit for a portrait,” I answered, “but you may ask her, of course. Now what will be the subject of your first etching?”

“I thought perhaps you would pose,” Vincent answered. “As I have already painted you, I have worked out some of the fundamental questions of tone, what needs to be darker or lighter, and how pronounced those variations should be. This way I can concentrate on using the needle. Do I handle it as if it were a pen?”

“Almost,” I answered. “You have no control over the width of the line, of course. And you should try to keep it perpendicular to the plate. You will also need a light touch. You are just removing the varnish; the acid will make the mark in the plate.”

“Would you sit at the table?” he asked me. “In that chair, leaning on the table? Just like the painted portrait. And for dark areas, I assume I should make some kind of hatching pattern?”

“Yes, like an ink drawing. The closer the lines, the darker the tone.”

He went to work quickly, showing no hesitation. The copper plate lay on the table between us, and Vincent’s eyes moved back and forth between it and me. “I think I would like to include your pipe, Doctor, do you have it nearby?”

I almost cautioned him against making the composition too complex. Etching is disconcerting. Most artists new to the technique would have experimented with something simple, like a vase of flowers or a few apples on a plate. But Vincent grasped the process with remarkable speed. No doubt he was helped by the fact that, as he said, he had already analyzed the patterns of dark and light made by my face. Yet he managed, in his first and only etching, to communicate not only what I looked like, what I was wearing, and my expression, but the texture of my hair and coat. He even sketched in some of the garden behind me, somehow indicating the distance between me and the nearest rosebush.

I had already acknowledged to myself that Vincent van Gogh was enormously talented. I knew that my experience as an artist helped me to understand how exceptional his paintings were. But for years I had thought of myself as primarily an etcher. If I, a doctor, had an artistic medium, it was this one, the elaborate and messy process of etching, biting in acid, wiping the plate, inking it, and finally printing an impression on dampened paper. When Vincent had asked to try his hand at it, I was pleased to think that I could be the expert. His portrait of me, L’Homme à la pipe, showed me definitively that this was not so. His first attempt at a notoriously difficult medium demonstrated once again the magnitude of his artistic gift.

When I began my externship at the Salpêtrière, in 1855, I was twenty-six and advanced in my medical studies. By then I had already trained with a surgeon and with a general physician. I had seen the human heart laid bare and had taken a saw to living bone. Yet our mad patients drew my interest as no others had. There seemed to be so little, sometimes, between us. Who has not felt the shroud of melancholy, that pall of listlessness that devalues any effort and washes all color to gray? Who has not become attached to a notion and blindly refused to see reason? Who has not chosen to see himself as something entirely other than what he is?

They seized my imagination, these madwomen. I spent more and more time at the hospital and neglected my other studies. But the lectures in the vast amphitheater of the Faculté de Médecine, delivered by gray-haired professors in academic robes, seemed to have very little to do with helping human beings in pain. I thought we could do better.

One of Dr. Pinel’s innovations was to distinguish among the different kinds of mental disturbance. Until his direction of the asylum, the epileptic and the idiotic, the violent and the meekly melancholy were all housed together. Pinel established the first classifications of madness—differentiating among melancholia, mania, dementia, and idiocy—and attempted to relieve them. Yet some patients improved, while others did not. It seemed clear that we could not successfully cure madness until we knew what caused it, which was one of the great debates of the day. Many patients who died were autopsied. Their brains and nerves were searched for lesions or anomalies so that connections could be made between anatomy and behavior. Perhaps there were other physical causes so far undiagnosed. So we studied the madwomen with intensity, taking notes and consulting each other. I began to carry a pocket journal, in which I took down fleeting impressions. “Kindness is not drowned in madness,” I wrote one day. “Ursule and Marie-Ange often walk in the courtyard with Yvonne. She does not appear to recognize them.” And “Certain sounds are especially disturbing to the women. I hate to see them flinching when the bells chime the hours.”

Most of our patients were poor and came from the dark, damp, congested, disease-ridden parts of Paris. This was before the famous transformation of our city under Baron Haussmann. The broad boulevards and grandiose monuments like the new Opéra did not yet exist. Instead there were large areas, like the entire Île de la Cité, where medieval buildings leaned together across moist alleys, where chunks of fetid plaster dropped from walls, where families of eight crowded into a single room, a single bed. The Salpêtrière, with its rows of beds and refectory tables, its regular meals and tall windows, its sympathetic treatment of inmates and measured, predictable periods of work and leisure, provided many patients with a level of health and comfort they had not previously known. Sometimes their mental states improved swiftly.

Many earnest efforts were made to counter the tedium inherent in an establishment like the Salpêtrière, whose buildings and courtyards, though spacious, tended toward gloom. The notion of moral treatment included extensive recreation for the patients. They spent time in the courtyards each day and went to services in the chapel if they chose. There were performances and social events, like the annual bal des folles, a costume ball that traditionally took place a few Sundays before Easter. The patients spent hours beforehand planning their costumes and hours afterward discussing the party. At first I found the idea of the costume ball bizarre—when you are already mad, a stranger to yourself, why dress up as someone else?—but I realized after witnessing it myself how important it was in breaking up the monotony of life in an institution.

A few weeks after the ball, I unintentionally provided another distraction for some of the women in my division. My superior Dr. Falret was in charge of two hundred women, mostly victims of melancholia or manias. The madwomen seemed to like me, though I suspected they did not take me as seriously as I would have hoped. I often spent my free time with them during their recreation sessions, which grew livelier as the weather warmed. Some of the enclosures had grass or flowers, which were highly valued by the patients. Woe to the woman who stepped off the slate path onto the tender green blades and jeopardized their growth! She would be shrilly scolded by her fellow patients. In the graveled courts, the patients had more freedom to move. Some skipped aimlessly like children and loved to play with a ball. Some drifted around as if hearing private music, raising their arms, swaying, bowing. When I could, I would sit on a bench and watch, or talk to the women who approached me. They were like all of us in this: they loved attention.

Of course not everything they told you was true. They gossiped eagerly about each other, but with even greater zeal about us, the doctors. According to them, we were always madly in love with our patients.

I was sitting on a stone bench in a patch of sun one day when this amorous fantasy was brought up. Next to me was Laure, a patient—and a former nurse—a little older than I who had actually grown up in the Salpêtrière. Her case was not especially unusual. What could be more normal in this enclosed world than a marriage between a gardener, her father, and a nurse, her mother? And what more normal than that the daughter of such a marriage should take up her mother’s occupation? It had struck me as strange at first that she should have gone mad. Could madness be contagious, then? Or was she feigning illness? Trading the authority of a staff member for the fecklessness of the patient? I could not decide, but I always listened carefully to Laure.

“There is a strange young man here today,” she told me on a warm day in April. “He goes everywhere, I hear, even the dormitories. He has a pad of paper, and he is drawing us! What do you think about this, Doctor?” she asked.

“It seems harmless,” I told her. “He is my friend, you know. I have known him for many years. He is called Monsieur Gautier.”

“But why is he here?”

“He came for the ball, a few weeks ago, with the art students. He was the Roman soldier. Were you there?”

Over the years, the bal des folles had also, oddly enough, become an informal tradition for the students of the École des Beaux-Arts. Every year a group of them dressed in elaborate costumes and arrived at the asylum to enliven the party. Gautier had borrowed the costume of a Roman soldier from the studio of his teacher, Cogniet. With its breastplate and red-plumed helmet, he would have been conspicuous in any group. But the costume also included a kind of short, pleated skirt covered with strips of leather. My friend’s strong, bare legs had been much admired.

“Oh, yes, I remember him, Doctor. We all do. But nobody knows why he has come back.”

“He is an artist, so he wants to draw the women here. He thinks he might like to do a painting of some of you. I asked Dr. Falret if he might visit. After the doctor spoke to him, he agreed to it.”

Laure’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t understand. We aren’t beautiful.”

“Perhaps you are beautiful in his eyes,” I suggested.

“He is certainly beautiful in ours!” She sniggered. “Don’t you remember that he was the king of the ball? The women loved seeing his legs! Now they will want to show him theirs!” She rocked with laughter, slapping her thigh. The coarse humor of a nurse? The lack of control of a madwoman? The former, I thought.

“Then no one will mind his presence here?”

“Oh, far from it, Doctor!” She chortled. “The more young men, the merrier.” She stood up to leave me. “They’re already calling him Jules César,” she said and walked away.

“Apparently they refer to you as Jules César,” I informed Gautier when he strolled into the courtyard a few minutes later. “Because of your costume for the ball. They voted you king for your legs.”

The remark would have made me blush, but Gautier was always difficult to embarrass. “So I’ve been told,” he said, sitting down next to me. “The patients see my legs as more of an advantage than Dr. Falret did.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Not in so many words. Just warned me about the general standards for behavior around here. He impressed upon me that these are women without inhibitions, not aware of what they’re saying. I didn’t really understand what he meant until one of them walked right up and kissed me. The doctor is wrong, they know exactly what they’re saying,” he protested. “I’ve been propositioned very explicitly twice, and I’ve only been here since noon.”

“Oh, yes, that’s the other thing. I was informed last week that this group of externs is disappointing. Not handsome enough. So you shouldn’t be proud, it’s only that they’re desperate.”

He looked me up and down theatrically. “Well, of course they are. Look at you!” He was quicker-witted than I was.

We sat silently for a few minutes, watching the women. There was a quality to their voices that I was trying to analyze, a kind of high timbre that made them sound more like children than grown women. I took out my notebook to write down some of the phrases I could make out: “Take it, take it!” called one woman, while another sang a bit of plainsong, perfectly.

Gautier had his portfolio on his knee, with a sheet of paper clipped to it. As if without thinking, he drew a few lines, and the space of the courtyard was suddenly defined on his page. A light vertical, the tree in the center. Two more lines, the path. I had seen him do this over and over again since he arrived in Paris three years earlier. Out of nothing, he conjured something. Though you knew it was just charcoal on paper, your eye accepted the illusion. A tree, a wall, a hat, a man, a bowl of fruit. He complained endlessly about the École des Beaux-Arts and the ceaseless repetitive drawing exercises that he considered useless, but I had known his work as a student back in Lille. He had improved immensely since then.

Now he began to rough in the figures. Laure and a friend were strolling up the walkway. An old woman, one of the “restantes”—a permanent patient who would live out her days at the Salpêtrière—was standing still in the sunlight, gabbling up at the sky and gesticulating with her hands raised. “Can you tell, by looking at them, the nature of their illness?” he asked, his eyes swinging between the patients and the paper.

“Sometimes,” I answered, watching his charcoal. My own notebook felt clumsy in my hands. “The one in the cloak,” I went on, “sitting on the ground, is a melancholiac. Always sad, lacking spirit, lacking energy. They turn in upon themselves. You often see them curled up like this,” I said, folding my arms to my chest and lifting my knees. “That one, over there, is another.” I pointed. “The woman with her face to the wall. She will remain there, immobile, until the wardress brings her inside.”

“Will she get better?”

“She won’t get worse.”

“And why does that woman have to wear a straitjacket?”

“She is what we call a furieuse. Normally they are housed in their own ward, but her madness has just recently become violent, so she is still with her usual companions. She may yet calm down, and we don’t like to move patients to different divisions unless it’s necessary. The furieuses have manic spells when they hit and scratch and shriek. They become dangerous to themselves and to others, so they must be restrained in the jackets.”

“And the one flouncing around with the imaginary fan?”

“What we call a monomaniac. She believes she is the Duchesse de Berry, and when she has delivered the heir to the throne, she will move to the Tuileries.”

“Don’t tell the emperor,” Gautier joked. “Does she know about any of it? About 1848?”

“We tell her. She doesn’t hear. She awaits her confinement steadfastly. She sometimes even begins labor. And here is the remarkable thing, Gautier—she has not had her monthly courses in years, and when her imaginary labor begins, her heartbeat rises and her stomach muscles actually contract. Look at the way she walks,” I added. She took slow steps, almost waddling, the hand without the fan at the small of her back.

“And don’t tell me, she’ll get better when there’s a Bourbon back on the throne?”

“We do our best,” I said sharply, turning to face Gautier. “There is much we don’t know. If you’re here to mock, you’re no better than the barbarians who used to jeer at the lunatics in chains.”

“No, no,” he said, in a soothing tone of voice, shading the melancholiac’s cloak. “You’re such a hothead, Gachet. I mean no disrespect. But you have to admit it’s funny. Walking around thinking she’s pregnant with the heir to the throne, two regimes ago.”

“I don’t agree,” I answered shortly.

“It’s not even funny that the regimes changed so quickly?”

“Least of all that. Listen, I cannot laugh at these women. There is so little separating them from us.”

He turned and looked me full in the face. “You always were very sensitive. I mean no disrespect.”

“But you find madness amusing,” I insisted, refusing to let it go.

He didn’t respond right away. Instead he sketched the old woman with the raised hands. It would have been easy to exaggerate her pose in order to mock her. A grimace here, a clenched hand there, and the women would look like hags, somehow less than human. But Gautier’s drawing did not put a distance between the observer and the observed. From the sketches he made at the hospital, he later created a painting called The Madwomen of the Salpêtrière, which was exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon of 1857. People found his portrayal of my patients remarkably sympathetic.

“I don’t find madness amusing,” he finally said, “and I don’t find any of these individuals amusing. But I’m not trying to save them. That may be the difference between us.”

“No,” I admitted, “I can see that you aren’t laughing at them.” I gestured to his drawing. “It would show.”

“Well, then,” he said, teasing the page out from beneath the clip and sliding it into the portfolio. “You can stop protecting them from me, can’t you?” He got up quickly and was gone before I could formulate a response.

I sat there for a while longer, thinking about what he had said. Perhaps I did feel protective of the women, but that did not seem inappropriate. They were vulnerable. With Gautier, I was not worried about their physical welfare. Since he lived next door to me, I knew that he was currently occupied with both a hatter’s apprentice and a barmaid. Surely the two of them (each ignorant of the other) satisfied his lust and delight in intrigue.

I perceived a different kind of vulnerability in the madwomen. Gautier had come close to it when he mentioned the women’s propositions to him. “They know exactly what they’re saying,” he’d insisted, contradicting Dr. Falret’s assertion. Perhaps both men were right, or neither was. Perhaps the madwomen expressed their truest thoughts, regardless of the audience. They had lost sight of what was expected or forbidden and obeyed impulses as they occurred. That, then, was the source of the madwomen’s frailty: They were missing the cloak of convention. Their emotions were laid bare.

I surveyed the women in the courtyard, wondering if this notion applied to them. To the melancholiac sitting on the ground, most certainly. This woman felt her very existence as a burden too heavy to bear. The woman talking gibberish to the sky was also so lost in her own world that she seemed oblivious to the world in which she lived, the way a feverish patient may kick off all coverings and expose his body, unaware of his immodesty.

Was that why I was so uncomfortable with Gautier drawing them? Did it seem like an exposure? Somehow the idea made me cringe, the idea of drawing the mad. It had been done often before, I knew, usually with satiric intent. But I had acquitted Gautier of that. Whence my anxiety?

I turned the page of my notebook and looked at the women. I drew a line on the page: the cloak of the woman standing still by the wall. A simple, U-shaped line. Now what? I looked again. I tried to force myself to draw only what my eye saw, not what I knew was there. Not the body in the round, the shoulders or the bowed head, but the patterns of dark and light. Drawing the mad. To see why I felt it was wrong, I would try it.

The pen was a terrible instrument. Every mistake was permanent. It was too black, too coarse. I could make only lines, not shadows, and the lines I made were ugly. The memory of Gautier’s deftness annoyed me. It was so simple for him to draw. He scarcely thought about it, barely considered where the charcoal should next touch the page or how to shape a stroke. I made a few sad, vertical lines to indicate folds on the woman’s cloak. The hem rippled. I drew a wavy line. I hated it.

Hands are difficult. Even gifted artists shy away from hands. I blew the ink dry on the page and turned it over. At the center, toward the top, I made two clusters of tiny lines—one, two, three, four, five. I drew another line down from them, and another—arms, raised overhead. I glanced at the woman talking to the sky, who was now singing and gently swaying, reaching upward. I drew in an oval between the lines, for her head. It was the most rudimentary, clumsy sketching. I had taken lessons in Lille; I knew better ways to do these things. But something drove me to continue. I wanted to finish what I had begun. Features in the oval; dashes for eyes, an open O for the mouth. Hair; straight lines with no hint of the limpness of the real thing.

It was impossible. I had no idea how to render what I saw into marks on the page. The woman turned, bent at the waist, turned again. I drew a line that gave her a torso, hips, a skirt. The line sagged. I persisted. The shoulders were nonexistent. The nib of the pen sputtered and skipped as I drew, leaving ragged outlines. I didn’t know what to do about feet. I tried, remembering the words of my teacher, to lay down a shadow with a few parallel lines.

I was working faster now, driven by frustration but also a kind of hunger. I didn’t like what I was producing; it made me despise my incapacity. But as I drew, something strange happened. I could not translate what I saw into lines on the page. But I could, by trying to draw the women, share their physical state. I could sense the strange internal rhythm that prompted one to dance, the black weight that surrounded and stifled the melancholiac.

One of the furieuses had come into the courtyard wearing her straitjacket. Like some of her fellow patients, she had very short hair. Sometimes the wardresses cut patients’ hair to keep them from pulling it out. Her head looked strangely large and her neck slender, like a child’s. She walked carefully, very upright, as if barely keeping her balance with every step. I flipped a page and made a quick, narrow triangle—her skirt as she walked. I didn’t know how to continue. For her upper body I drew nothing more than a kind of block, with angles indicated to signal the bent elbows. Her head was not round, but I had made a circle anyway, then corrected it. I was pressing too hard with the pen now, dragging threads of paper with the nib, almost tearing the page. My hands were shaking with my rage and frustration. I could not draw. I could not draw these women. And yet I felt a kind of compulsion to do it. I was sure I knew now how to walk in a gilet de force.

The chapel bell began to ring, and I knew it was time for me to go. My absence at the Faculté de Médecine had been remarked on with disapproval. I screwed the cap onto my pen and slipped it into my pocket, but I carried my notebook by the cover, to let the pages flutter themselves dry in the air. Later that day I returned to the hospital and coaxed a wardress to button me into one of the straitjackets. She must have thought I looked comical, pacing up and down the empty dormitory with my hands trapped in the endless sleeves and tied behind my back.

That night, at home, I tore the sheets from my notebook and spread them out on my table. What I saw made me flinch, yet it also held my attention. The drawings were raw, even ugly. But they had a vivid quality that surprised me. They were direct and urgent. I had somehow managed to capture some of the emotional force of my mad patients. And though I never said so directly to Gautier, his big Salon painting The Women of the Salpêtrière—an achievement, a success, an example of everything painting aspired to in 1857—remained for me a beautiful but somehow tepid canvas.

I understand this now, years later, having known Vincent’s work, and having drawn Vincent myself. He was able to create haunting images that reached the heart of the viewer. That was his astounding gift to the world. I achieved only that a handful of times. Was it because my subjects, in all of these cases, were mad? Did my lack of technique correspond to their mental anomalies? Or was it that my sympathy for them, in their alienated state, allowed me to reach beyond the conventional in my art?

Then I sometimes wonder, would I have been a better artist if I had not retained my sanity? And, would Vincent have been a genius if he had not been mad? Was his madness the price of his talent? I don’t believe that it was. And yet the doubt lingers.