You don’t have to be a sorcerer to figure out how it had happened, what precarious forms it had assumed while becoming imbedded within him: the image of Gavroche frozen in midair, either rising or falling, and the high barricade and little rosette, all in a tattered book; the name les Trois Glorieuses; the heroic rumors of blue-collar resolve halting the great charge of the cuirassiers, the white coats of the workers and the red flags of the others standing watch through the night, face-to-face, trembling; the memory of his father’s humiliations, in whom, perhaps, a prince with black feathers and a sky blue cap had also reigned; the brochures in which unremembered hacks had appeared — Anacharsis Cloots and possibly the others, the Brutuses who were locked up in ‘93—those who had seized their hour of princedom between two eras of executions, those exultant lawyers whom he took for members of the proletariat, like himself. And, of course, there was a young Blanquiste with white hands, perhaps with a red beard, a broken-down boyar who, in his cheap room, spoke feverishly in incomprehensible words describing an incomprehensible paradise flowing with rivers of blood. And the young Roulin, who didn’t dare demand explanations, simply opined wisely, listening petrified while this ferocity resonated long within him; and this ferocity, doubtless the same that pushed him into the white pit of absinthe, this rage, or this fear, became concrete, took flag and song, even took shape and joined the visible world.
So much for the republic. Its shadow was the only thing that helped him to refuse to be Roulin, which is to say, to accept pretending to be Roulin; this denial dressed him each morning in the great peacoat, brutally pushed him before daybreak toward the mail bags and the reprimands, but as if it were someone else at work. The prince was either larking or being massacred in some recess of the postman, who was just going through the motions. This gave him an inner life, and with it, he married Augustine, in whom he sowed his seed; he cajoled and reprimanded Armand, Camille, and Marcelle, all issue of Augustine; he made a little garden in which to grow lettuce. It gave him a cover, because it isn’t enough in this world just to be a postman, or a storekeeper — as if that weren’t murderous enough: you have to declare yourself a postman for the red or the white, to have ideas and a jumble of hackneyed words and attitudes that one calls a personality; you need these little trifles so you don’t drink your absinthe alone in a bistro on the outskirts of Aries, so that you’re not singled out, so that you don’t slip into the gutter. All this led him to the age of forty-seven years and the appearance that the paintings reveal. And then we have to believe that he was surprised a second time.
PERHAPS IT WAS IN SOME BISTRO, or more precisely at the Café de la Gare, place Lamartine, chez Mother Ginoux, the beautiful hotel proprietress who was painted wearing a little lace bonnet and a black shawl, her hand pensive and weary, her eye imperial and weary, painted as few Spanish queens had been, as if, without hesitation, the great Spaniards themselves had descended to guide the hand of the painter. Her husband had also been painted, next to the long, empty billiard table, beneath the gas-burning lamps, in hell, more spectre than king of Spain, insubstantial, insomniac, and pale. It was in this same hell or good haven that on one October night, the dead king received Monsieur Paul, who was coming to join Monsieur Vincent, a bag slung over his shoulder with the odd bearing of a sailor, a topman, Monsieur Paul about whom he’d heard so much that he recognized him instantly, whom he therefore welcomed, proudly guiding him around the tables of what Vincent called dormeurs petits, little sleepers, toward a table near the hearth, and then served him a grog with all the attention and kindness only the living are capable of. Or, perhaps, it was at the church square, which is also place de la République, blessed by the massive crucifix of Saint Trophime, which Roulin didn’t care about, but where the tricolor billowed, and he did care about that. Perhaps it was there, at high noon, thanks to the Zouave who knew both of them from somewhere else, who put them face-to-face in broad daylight and with excited, inexact words, introduced them, his enormous red culotte spread between the two as they eyed each other. Or it was near the gas works, or pont Langlois, amidst the modernism of the high furnaces or the archaism of running water; or perhaps, inevitably, along the melancholy Alyscamps. And it was simply at the train station, at the end of a very hot afternoon in June or July, when the postman was on duty, say, working at the dispatch desk for the fourth-class mail deposit, la petite vitesse, sitting in a stifling little room, slouching a little, staring at his shoes, sick of being Joseph Roulin and having to wear such enormous boots in this heat. Raising his head, he saw a client in front of him on the other side of the window. The customer wasn’t wearing the yellow hat; his hair wasn’t shaved short; he wasn’t gesturing madly; he wasn’t sputtering incomprehensibly; he didn’t appear mad, and he was smaller than the Manhattan skyline; he had an accent that we don’t know, but a red beard that we do, and he wore a blue thrift-shop suit made of denim or drugget. He handed the postman a package he wished to send by way of la petite vitesse to a Monsieur Théodore van Gogh, living in Paris; the package was long, cylindrical, rather heavy, and on the form in the section marked “Content of Parcel” he wrote that it was paintings. The postman was surprised that they could roll up and wander off, just like that, without the golden frames from which they seem inseparable, that give them dignity and rigor. So of course they started talking, because the postman was curious, because he thought he knew that the republic — the true Republic, not the one that had just usurped the tricolor to colonize Tonkin and nourish the Jesuits, but the other one in which, in his dreams, he was a Prince — loved the beaux arts and functioned in such a way that everyone involved with the beaux arts had a chance at a just reward, in which they could find a pleasure in their trade as unambiguous as absinthe, instead of the shame that comes from appreciating none of it and having to pretend to understand it all; and van Gogh, who in the end got nothing from the beaux arts or from those he met, was drawn violently toward them both all the same. So they begin talking and find that they enjoy each other’s company; Roulin gets up, they leave, they cross place Lamartine, which is all yellow; the smaller of the two stops in front of a house even more yellow, pointing it out to Roulin, who stands in polite amazement, nodding his head, taking a step as if to go inside but the first holds him back, the renovations aren’t finished, it’s too soon to go inside for a drink; the two of them stand there for an instant, they hesitate, they float, between the yellow roughcast earth and the pure cobalt sky; the great Manichaean and Byzantine terrains of reality have been confronted; then they leave again, both in Prussian blue, Roulin bigger, more visible, more bearded; beside him the other’s head is bowed, solitary, attentive, something aristocratic in the way he closes the flap on a pocket or grasps firmly the collar of his drugget coat; Roulin looks at him out of the corner of his eye, the striped arm of the peacoat pushes open a glass-paneled door, allowing the other to go in first, the artist — enter my prince — and at last the boyar and his muzhik are in a good haven, in hell; they sit down in the Café de la Gare surrounded by the clashing green and red decor, Manichaean, old Russian, and within this oven they smile at each other and turn their eyes in unison toward the little green Louis XV counter over there, and behind it stands something like a queen of Spain, an Arlesienne; they take out their pipes, share their tobacco. Marie Ginoux serves their bocks.