What surprised him isn’t in any of the books. It wasn’t Vincent’s originality, his eccentricities; he’d read the newspapers, he knew that artists were a strange breed; and besides, he himself was original, a turbulent presence within a neighborhood that took him for a radicaclass="underline" so the yellow hat, the lively fits, his way of speaking ornately — it was all to be expected. It wasn’t that he was any more miserable than the others; those same newspapers had unveiled that the artist in his thirties is usually poor, that it adds to his vigor, to his seriousness, adds to the éclat of his revenge when he finally triumphs, and gives him a clear conscience that acts as proof of his self-resolve; and we know what misery is all about, how to deal with it, how to charm it with bits of magic, the preserves, the wine, the Sunday dinners; and if underneath it all the artist is somehow a proletarian, as the leftist papers affirm, then to nourish him is a pious act. It wasn’t about being chosen as a model by a painter from Paris — why not him? He was just as worthy as anyone else. It wasn’t even van Gogh’s painting in itself, the finished products in which Roulin saw himself become someone else, tolerant and unconvinced, noticing that his beard was too green or too curly, or here as inflexible as justice miscarried, his eye sultanlike or saintly, and his hat — always well rendered: all in all, he must not have found it very pretty and must have told him so or, more probably, just kept it to himself, because he had an open mind and knew that Monsieur Vincent knew what he was doing. And of course, within this Dutchman who was gentle most of the time, filled with caring attentions and gratitude, there was also a fierce prince that the sort of prince in Roulin had noticed right away, perhaps in the same way that Vincent had watched Mother Ginoux undulate her way around the tables when she brought them their bocks, in the same way that within his courteous words would sometimes resonate an uncompromising order, in the way that he always painted: his was only a more decorated prince, more imperious and better born than Roulin’s, something different from a postman’s prince, the equal of a man who had traveled and knew several languages; the equal of a boyar. And Roulin regretted that such violent appetites had been locked into a man so agonizingly unlucky; Roulin knew all this in his own way, accepted it without surprise, and loved him with a touch of duplicity, fraternally.
Let’s look at Roulin one Sunday morning in August, following the fanatic down a road on the outskirts of Aries, when it wasn’t portraits that he was painting but when he went
sur le motif, thus preparing the work of his biographers, doing the solar-liturgy thing, the Mexican standoff with the source of all light; and there, I’m sure he saw nothing liturgical or Mexican, but something pictorial, yes, and audacious, since he was doing what the Impressionists themselves seldom dared do; if he was wearing the yellow hat, it was simply because the sun was beating down; neither Roulin nor I see anything sacrificial about it. So there it is: there they are, fairly far along the road to Tarascón; they descend into a great field of melons or wheat billowing down below; the cicadas are tirelessly devouring time, space, as it’s already ten o’clock; van Gogh could have managed without Roulin, he tries not to see or hear him, but he doesn’t make him leave — he’s a good man to be with when not painting; he plants the easel, he takes out the three chrome yellow tubes, squeezes one of them and applies it, and once again the little drama hesitates and unfolds on a canvas for the biographers to come, the businessmen in Manhattan; Roulin sits beneath a tree, perhaps with a small picnic basket and a bottle from Augustine beside him, and he watches. He had tried to gab a little, but he quickly shut up, the other answering halfheartedly, out of his head and in a hurry, looking at the fields of melons and some meagre lumps in the distance, the foothills of the Alps, as if all the little made-up ladies from rue des Récollettes were dancing and lifting their skirts, leaping toward him, calling to him, denying him; Roulin looks at the great expanse before the foothills, twenty kilometers at least — and of course he knows neither who created them nor to what end, why the wheat grows there and later yellows, why one time out of two the sun up above replaces the stars — but he knows the names of the people who live on the farms, which families withdraw into the shade to elude the sun’s rays and with the sun’s help grow their wheat; he knows who built the little surrounding wall, how long it takes to go by foot to Montmajour, which you can see from here; he knows that at Fontvieille, which you can’t see, lying hidden by those cypresses, is a republican confrere whose company he enjoys. The cicadas sing louder, from tree to tree, covering the visible world. And before this expanse that one needn’t name — which is clearly marked on cadastres, the wheat of which will be fairly distributed to the less fortunate when the true republic finally cloisters the world — Roulin now watches this man of meagre volume, standing and preoccupied, incomprehensible, who doesn’t even know the names of these places and in lieu of the cadastral marks applies thick yellows and perfunctory blues to a canvas of meagre dimensions, a fabric of unreadable runes more aware of the hills than of Roulin, scorning him more than those foothills would if you were hiking them and midday sneaked up on you, without a tree in sight. I would like to believe that once again he is surprised; I hope what surprises him is a question perhaps as imposing, perhaps as superfluous as and even more opaque than the future of the human race, which, in his own words, he called the republic; the question that played through him and that certainly never made it into words, but in which he exalted, filling him with a great pity for, and devotion to, the painter, is this: Roulin asked himself by what ruse more perverse than the seizure of the notaries during the Republic of ’93, by what outlandishness painting seemed to him, and actually was, a human occupation like any other — carrying as its burden the need to represent what is seen, as others are burdened with raising wheat or making money beget money, an occupation that is learned and passed on, producing tangible things destined to make the houses of the rich look nice, or to be placed in churches to exalt the devoted little souls of the children of Mary, or in the prefectures to call young men to a career, the army, the Colonies — how and why this occupation, useful and clear, had become this phenomenal anomaly, despotic, dedicated to nothing, empty, this catastrophic labor that, on its passage between a man and the world, had tossed to one side the carcass of the redhead, starving, without honor, running straight for the bedlam and knowing it — and to the other had thrown landscapes left formless from the force of thought, and unrecognizable faces wanting perhaps but to resemble the man, all in a world streaming with uninhabitable shapes, with stars burning too hot and water in which to drown. Behind the field of melons, horsemen of the Camargue march past, cowboys far from Hollywood; they’re all in black, their hats and their lances, since the road is black beneath the oaks; van Gogh isn’t painting them, he’s into chrome yellow number three, the pure sun; he sweats; in his own way, Roulin is rethinking the enigma of the beaux arts.