“It’s nothing unusual, Vincent,” said Roulin. “Down here in Tartarin’s country we are all a trifle cracked.”
“Well, well,” said Vincent, “we understand each other like members of the same family.”
A few more weeks passed. Vincent was now able to work all day in the studio. Thoughts of madness and death left his mind. He began to feel almost normal.
Finally he ventured out of doors to paint. The sun was burning up the magnificent yellow of the cornfields. But Vincent could not capture it. He had been eating regularly, sleeping regularly, avoiding excitement and intense enthusiasm.
He was feeling so normal he could not paint.
“You are a grand nerveux, Vincent,” Doctor Rey had told him. “You never have been normal. But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.”
Vincent knew that to attain the high yellow note which dominated his Arlesian canvases he had to be on edge, strung up, throbbingly excited, passionately sensitive, his nerves rasped raw. If he allowed himself to get into that state, he could paint again as brilliantly as he had before. But the road led to destruction.
“An artist is a man with his work to do,” he murmured to himself. “How stupid for me to remain alive if I can’t paint the way I want to paint.”
He walked in the fields without his hat, absorbing the power of the sun. He drank in the mad colours of the sky, the yellow ball of fire, the green fields and bursting flowers. He let the mistral lash him, the thick night sky throttle him, the sunflowers whip his imagination to a bursting point. As his excitement rose, he lost his appetite for food. He began to live on coffee, absinthe, and tobacco. He lay awake nights with the deep colours of the countryside rushing past his bloodshot eyes. And at last he loaded his easel on his back and went into the fields.
His powers came back; his sense of the universal rhythm of nature, his ability to smash off a large canvas in a few hours and flood it with glaring, brilliant sunshine. Each day saw a new picture created; each day saw a rise in his emotional gauge. He painted thirty-seven canvases without a pause.
One morning he awoke feeling lethargic. He could not work. He sat on a chair. He stared at a wall. He hardly moved all through the day. The voices came back to his ears and told him queer, queer tales. When night fell he walked to the grey restaurant and sat down at a little table. He ordered soup. The waitress brought it to him. A voice rang sharply in his ear, warning him.
He swept the plate of soup to the floor. The dish smashed in fragments.
“You’re trying to poison me!” he screamed. “You put poison in that soup!”
He jumped to his feet and kicked over the table. Some of the customers ran out the door. Others stared at him agape.
“You’re all trying to poison me!” he shouted. “You want to murder me! I saw you put poison in that soup!”
Two gendarmes came in and carried him bodily up the hill to the hospital.
After twenty-four hours he became quite calm and discussed the affair with Doctor Rey. He worked a little each day, took walks in the country, returned to the hospital for his supper and sleep. Sometimes he had moods of indescribable mental anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and of inevitable circumstance seemed for the twinkling of an eye to be parted.
Doctor Rey allowed him to paint again. Vincent did an orchard of peach trees beside a road, with the Alps in the background; an olive grove with leaves of old silver, silver turning to green against the blue, and with orange-coloured ploughed earth.
After three weeks, Vincent returned to the yellow house. By now the town, and especially the Place Lamartine, was incensed against him. The severed ear and the poisoned soup were more than they could accept with equanimity. The Arlesians were firmly convinced that painting drove men mad. When Vincent passed they stared at him, made remarks out loud, sometimes even crossed the street so as to avoid passing him.
Not a restaurant in the city would allow him to enter the front door.
The children of Arles gathered before the yellow house and made up games to torment him.
“Fou-rou! Fou-rour!” they cried out. “Cut off your other ear.”
Vincent locked his windows. The shouts and laughter of the children drifted through.
“Fou-rou! Fou-rou!”
“Crazy man! Crazy man!”
They made up a little song which they sang beneath his window.
Vincent tried going out to escape them. They followed him through the streets, into the fields, a jolly crowd of singing and laughing urchins.
Day after day their number increased as they gathered before the yellow house. Vincent stuffed his ears with cotton. He worked at his easel, making duplicates of his pictures. The words of the children came through the cracks and the walls. They seared into his brain.
The young boys became more bold. They clambered up the drain pipes like little monkeys, sat on the window sills, peered into the room and shouted at Vincent’s back.
“Fou-rou, cut off your other ear. We want your other ear!”
The tumult in the Place Lamartine increased. The boys put up boarding on which they could climb to the second floor. They broke the windows, poked their heads in, threw things at Vincent. The crowd below encouraged them, echoed their songs and shouts.
“Get us the other ear. We want the other ear!”
“Fou-rou! Want some candy? Look out, it’s poisoned!”
“Fou-rou! Want some soup? Look out, it’s poisoned!”
The boys perched on the window sill led the crowd below in a chant. Together, they sang with an ever rising crescendo.
“Fou-rou, fou-rou, throw us your ear, throw us your ear!”
“FOU-ROU, FOU-ROU, THROW US YOUR EAR, THROW US YOUR EAR!”
Vincent lurched up from his easel. There were three urchins sitting on his window sill, chanting. He lashed out at them. They scampered down the boarding. The crowd below roared. Vincent stood at the window, looking down at them.
A rush of blackbirds came out of the sky, thousands of cawing, beating blackbirds. They darkened the Place Lamartine, swooped down on Vincent, struck him, filled the room, engulfed him, flew through his hair, into his nose and mouth and eyes, buried him in a thick, black, airless cloud of flapping wings.
Vincent jumped on to the window sill.
“Go away!” he screamed. “You fiends, go away! For God’s sake, leave me in peace!”
“FOU-ROU, FOU-ROU, THROW US YOUR EAR, THROW US YOUR EAR!”
“Go away! Let me alone! Do you hear, let me alone!”
He picked up the wash basin from the table and flung it down at them. It smashed on the cobblestones below. He ran about in a rage picking up everything he could lay his hands on and flinging them down into the Place Lamartine to be hopelessly smashed. His chairs, his easel, his mirror, his table, his bedclothing, his sunflower canvases from the walls, all rained down on the urchins of Provence. And with each article there went a flashing panorama of his days in the yellow house, of the sacrifices he had made to buy, one by one, these simple articles with which he was to furnish the house of his life.