It should be said that Roulin was in good hands: before his eyes was a mirage more powerful than that of the Grand Soir. He had before him in the little fields of melons, at the Sunday dinner table and on the bowling greens of place Lamartine, a piece of abstraction made flesh, the incarnation of the theory of the beaux arts as the romantics had concocted, that the other schools had affirmed, and that still has a hold on us today, a product manufactured by books that managed to survive, but suffered; someone who had believed so devotedly in this theory that he had become theory himself, ascended to almost the same height, and died of it. And Roulin, who didn’t know the theory but saw its unmistakable incarnation, was astonished; because you don’t see that kind of thing every day; the same way that before the Knight of La Mancha, Sancho asked himself some questions; the same way that the apostles were spellbound before the other Incarnation, the one whose theory was thousands of years in the works, whose pages became flesh in the melon fields of Judah, named and marked on cadastres as welclass="underline" because no one is more sensitive to the book made man, they say, than those who don’t read books. And that’s enough: Joseph Roulin, who didn’t really know anything about the beaux arts and who, all in all, didn’t find van Gogh’s painting very pretty, appreciated all of it as if he had perceived that the arts from the end of this century, Art as they say, adds to the opacity of the world, troubling its all too credulous servants, all the way to the grave, in a violent dance, perhaps lively and ferocious, whose meaning fails to surface.
That’s why, in front of his glass of white wine, in a bistro of la Joliette, Roulin wasn’t shocked to read words written in the indecisive handwriting of a young girclass="underline" “Monsieur Vincent killed himself when he was with us.” But then he wasn’t thinking about painting, about the incarnation of a theorv, or about the pompous concoctions in which, fairly obscurely, he believed — in which we all believe. He thought about a client’s accent in the Aries train station during an afternoon in June, about the white tablecloths in the Carrel restaurant, the aioli, Vincent’s laugh when he sang the Marseillaise over dessert; he thought about the whole thing with the ear, how he hadn’t been allowed — him, Roulin — to go into the hospital room right away, but that Augustine had been allowed to, and he, waiting outside in the hallway, had seen her come out crying; he thought perhaps of a line from the letter he wrote the next day to Monsieur Gogh: “Yesterday, Thursday, my wife went to see him and he hid his face when he saw her come in.” Because in these stories about art, there are also the ultimate moments of shame of the great red children.
Let’s have a last look at Aries through the fingers van Gogh places over his face, when he had once again botched a painting, or when he awoke December 25 and saw the gendarmes, the hand towel filled with blood, the broken washbowl; when he saw Mother Roulin come in whom nonetheless he had painted. Let’s look at Aries where there’s the little pont Langlois, so tender and blue, an even bluer sky; vaqueros; zouaves; a copy of the Forum républicain where you read on the third page that a Foreigner cut off his own ear and brought it to a whore; a petition left at the town hall, signed by a neighborhood that wants to lock up a man who doesn’t have all of his head, in which I hope with all my strength that the name of Mother Ginoux does not figure, the name of the queen of Spain; fields of wheat or melons and an old, infallible sun. We are leaving. We are not leaving Europe, as Armand Roulin will quite soon, and we remain on this earth that van Gogh has already abandoned. We are going to Marseille, with the great peacoat and cap of the post office, on a body growing old.
MARSEILLE IS NEARER TO THE SUN than Arles. Van Gogh — who never thought as far as Rome, who was too modest or barbaric to think that far — van Gogh had thought about Marseille throughout his life; I don’t know what novel had made him imagine it to be some sort of artists’ Mecca, as he’d said, but he was surely the only artist to think it so, all because the painter Monticelli had lived and died there — done in by arrogance, misery, and absinthe, a painter he ranked as highly as Rembrandt, Rubens, Delacroix — Monticelli whose paintings I wouldn’t know how to judge but that they tell me aren’t so ugly; all Manhattan’s gold didn’t come bail him out, and on some shadowy provincial grave, tourists read a name that means nothing to them, he is lost: perhaps he wasn’t radical enough; he wasn’t friends with Pissarro, Seurat, those of the beau monde; and, of course, he’s missing the blow from the Browning sur le motif and the massive psychiatric syndrome; or — if God had not forsaken us — he didn’t know how to paint a proprietress as a queen of Spain, nor the first verses of the first book in a wheatfield, while the sunlight yellows. So van Gogh wanted to go to Marseille with Gauguin, and they would have gone there if, after two months in the yellow house, they hadn’t come to blows about wind and circumstance, overcooked onions, or each of their supercilious failures; and they would have strolled along the Canebière in full regalia, straight out of a picture postcard and so deckedout that Vincent would have written about it to Théo — immense yellow hat, not the straw but some kind of Stetson, black velvet jacket and white pants, yellow gloves, a reed cane and the air of a southern gentleman; and who knows if this would only have been a picture postcard, if it should make us smile: who knows if a rich van Gogh wouldn’t have been as elegant as Manet, and just as smitten with etiquette. But he never made it there: and, postmortem, he delegated Roulin.
Great castles of canvas are still entering the Vieux Port of this era, Melville’s very own; there are sailors and provisions, insatiable hungers, knife wounds; the sea opens up beyond Joliette’s docks and straight across, on the other side, is Egypt, whence came the arts and the merchants, the plague; where there are towers as tall as Manhattan’s own, and in their padlocked basements, kings turned to ashes settled in gold, golden, as everywhere beneath the towers. Standing around the Vieux Port, Roulin doesn’t think about any of this; he considers a spot where the world passes by en masse, Sundays or early on a weekday morning; he’s thinking about Armand, who’s on the other side of the same sea, sweating the natives for gold; maybe he’s thinking about the radiant tomorrows for the proletariats of Valparaiso, Alexandria, Piraeus, where commodities of every color and every language will debark before their eyes, maybe even some paintings, the holy commodity; and this prince Roulin — decorated like an officer of Montenegro, but invisibly — is moved, forever young in a Roulin who is no longer. Then he turns his back on this restlessness and returns through the plane trees; nineteen-year-old girls sell oysters beneath the leaves; he sings that le temps des cerises has returned, but not for him, he must hurry; he doesn’t work here; he works at the train station where other commodities bustle about, but none of the holy commodity that was rolled up and sent to Théo, a station that may already be called Saint-Charles, at the top of those interminable stairs; and he labors to climb them.