“On the other side my house overhangs fifteen yards of market gardener’s bed. ‘Have you a cantaloupe?’ I called to the gardener. ‘Certainly, Monsieur, a ripe one.’ At breakfast I ate my melon without a thought of the man who had hung himself. There is good in life as you see. Beside the poison there is the antidote. I was invited out to luncheon, so I put on my best shirt, expecting to thrill the company. I related the story. Smiling, quite unconcerned, they all asked me for a piece of the rope with which he had hung himself.”
Vincent looked closely at Paul Gauguin. He had the great, black head of a barbarian, with a massive nose that shot down from the corner of his left eye to the right corner of his mouth. His eyes were huge, almond shaped, protruding, invested with a fierce melancholy. Ridges of bone bulged over the eyes, under the eyes, ran down the long cheeks and across the wide chin. He was a giant of a man, with overwhelming brutal vitality.
Theo smiled faintly.
“Paul, I’m afraid you enjoy your sadism a little too much for it to be entirely natural. I’ll have to be going now; I have a dinner engagement. Vincent, will you join me?”
“Let him stay with me, Theo,” said Gauguin. “I want to get acquainted with this brother of yours.”
“Very well. But don’t pour too many absinthes into him. He’s not used them. Garçon. Combien!”
“That brother of yours is all right, Vincent,” said Gauguin. “He’s still afraid to exhibit the younger men, but I suppose Valadon holds him down.”
“He has Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and Manet on the balcony.”
“True, but where are the Seurats? And the Gauguins? And the Cezannes and Toulouse-Lautrecs? The other men are getting old now and their time is passing.”
“Oh, then you know Toulouse-Lautrec?”
“Henri? Of course! Who doesn’t know him? He’s a damn fine painter, but he’s crazy. He thinks that if he sleeps with five thousand women, he’ll vindicate himself for not being a whole man. Every morning he wakes up with a gnawing inferiority because he has no legs; every night he drowns that inferiority in liquor and a woman’s body. But it’s back with him again the next morning. If he weren’t crazy he’d be one of our best painters. Here’s where we turn in. My studio is on the fourth floor. Look out for that step. The board is broken.”
Gauguin went ahead and lighted a lamp. It was a shabby garret, with an easel, a brass bed, a table, and chair. In an alcove near the door Vincent saw some crude and obscene photographs.
“From these pictures I would say you don’t think very highly of love?”
“Where will you sit, on the bed or the chair? There’s some tobacco for your pipe on the table. Well, I like women, providing they are fat and vicious. Their intelligence annoys me. I have always wanted a mistress who was fat and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant. Did you read a short story published last month by a young chap by the name of Maupassant? He’s Zola’s protégé. A man who loves fat women has Christmas dinner served in his home for two and goes out to find company. He comes across a woman who suits him perfectly, but when they get to the roast, she is delivered of a bouncing baby boy!”
“But all this has very little to do with love, Gauguin.”
Gauguin stretched out on the bed, put one muscular arm under his head and blew clouds of smoke at the unpainted rafters.
“I don’t mean to say that I am not susceptible to beauty, Vincent, but simply that my senses will have none of it. As you perceive, I do not know love. To say, ‘I love you’ would break all my teeth. But I have no complaints to make. Like Jesus I say, ‘The flesh is the flesh and the spirit is the spirit.’ Thanks to this, a small sum of money satisfies my flesh, and my spirit is left in peace.”
“You certainly dismiss the matter very lightly!”
“No, whom one gets in bed with is no light matter. With a woman who feels pleasure, I feel twice as much pleasure. But I’d rather take the empty external gesture, and not get my emotions involved. I save them for my painting.”
“I’ve been coming to that point of view myself of late. No, thanks, I don’t think I could stand any more absinthe. Not at all, go right ahead. My brother Theo thinks highly of your work. May I see some of your studies?”
Gauguin jumped up.
“You may not. My studies are personal and private, like my letters. But I’ll show you my paintings. You won’t be able to see much in this light. Well, all right if you insist.”
Gauguin went on his knees, pulled a stack of canvases from under the bed, and stood them one by one against the absinthe bottle on the table. Vincent had been prepared to see something unusual, but he could feel nothing but stunned amazement at Gauguin’s work. He saw a confused mass of sun-drenched pictures; trees such as no botanist could discover; animals the existence of which had never been suspected by Cuvier; men whom Gauguin alone could have created; a sea that might have flowed out of a volcano; a sky which no God could inhabit. There were awkward and angular natives, with the mystery of the infinite behind their naïve, primitive eyes; dream canvases done in blazes of pink and violet and quivering red; sheer decorative scenes in which wild flora and fauna burst with the heat and light of the sun.
“You’re like Lautrec,” murmured Vincent. “You hate. You hate with all your might.”
Gauguin laughed. “What do you think of my painting, Vincent?”
“Frankly, I don’t know. Give me time to think about it. Let me come back and see your work again.”
“Come as often as you like. There is only one young man in Paris today whose painting is as good as mine; Georges Seurat. He, too, is a primitive. All the rest of the fools around Paris are civilized.”
“Georges Seurat?” asked Vincent. “I don’t believe I’ve heard of him.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. There’s not a dealer in town will exhibit his canvases. And yet he’s a great painter.”
“I’d like to meet him, Gauguin.”
“I’ll take you up there later. What do you say we have dinner and go up to Bruant’s? Have you any money? I’ve only about two francs. We’d better take this bottle with us. You go first. I’ll hold the lamp until you’re half way down, so you won’t break your neck.”
5
IT WAS ALMOST two in the morning before they got around to Seurat’s house.
“Aren’t you afraid we’ll wake him up?” asked Vincent.
“Lord, no! He works all night. And most of the day. I don’t think he ever sleeps. Here’s the house. It belongs to Georges’s mother. She once said to me, ‘My boy, Georges, he wants to paint. Very well then, let him paint. I have enough money for the two of us. Just so long as he is happy.’ He’s a model son to her. Doesn’t drink, smoke, swear, go out nights, pursue the ladies, or spend money on anything but materials. He has only one vice: painting. I’ve heard he has a mistress and a son living close by, but he never mentions them.”
“The house looks black,” said Vincent. “How are we going to get in without waking the whole family?”
“Georges has the attic. We will probably see a light from the other side. We’ll throw some gravel at his window. Here, you’d better let me. If you don’t throw it just right it’ll hit the third floor window and wake his mother.”
Georges Seurat came down to open the door, put a finger to his lips, and led them up three flights of stairs. He closed the door of his attic behind him.