more durable than the rabbit nonsense—that Vincent was murdered. He was killed, it is said, by the farmer whose wife he had painted. Some say they had been caught together beneath a haystack. The Parisian version (for some of these stories had even reached as far as the city) mentions an unnamed painter whom Vincent had insulted in a brothel. I don’t imagine anyone believed that for very long.
I never respond to the gossip, of course. Why should I tell what I know? It was a secret I shared with Vincent alone. And he took it to the grave.
One
WHEN THEO VAN GOGH first approached me about caring for his brother, I was in my sixties and I had been practicing medicine for thirty-one years. I was well established. My patients were a varied group, but for years I had specialized in diseases of the nerves and mental maladies. A handful of other men in Paris had similar qualifications, but it was my connection to the art world that brought Theo van Gogh to me in the spring of 1890. In fact, it was Camille Pissarro who sent him.
As a boy in Lille, I had studied painting, and through those lessons I came to know Amand Gautier. He was a little younger than I and significantly more talented, so it was no surprise to me that he was accepted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I had already spent two years at the Faculté de Médecine when he arrived in Paris in 1852, and my life was much livelier from that day. Gautier was an open, affable man, handsome and eager to make friends. What’s more, his fellow painting students were far more entertaining than my fellow medical students. I cared deeply about medical problems, but what I wanted to talk about was art, so I often went with Gautier to the artists’ cafés. And thus over the years I came to know them all—Courbet and Manet, Pissarro and Cézanne, Monet and Renoir, Sisley and Guillaumin.
In 1855 I was accepted as an extern under Dr. Jean-Pierre Falret at what was officially called the Hospice de la Vieillesse-Femmes at the Salpêtrière. Most of the patients were elderly, as the institution’s name would suggest, but Falret was famous for his innovative treatment of women of all ages who had lost their minds. My wife, Blanche, used to tease me, in the gentlest possible way, that the first women I ever knew were mad, pretending that this was why I found her so delightful. She may have been right. When we finally met, in 1868, I had known plenty of sane ladies, but none seemed to see the world in such a clear light as the woman who became my wife. I always relied on her generous but sensible perception of people and their emotions. It is precisely those points that the mad get wrong. You could even say that the definition of madness is a flawed understanding of the world around you. By that standard, Blanche was the sanest person I ever knew. Perhaps my years working in the asylum had made me especially grateful for her soundness.
Despite its reputation for modernity, the Salpêtrière, which had been built largely in the seventeenth century, looked like an old provincial town. The entire hospital was surrounded by a wall and formally laid out around the domed chapel. Parts of the grounds were beautiful: there were old trees, long, symmetrical walkways, and buildings constructed from the golden stone typical of Paris. But its history came with drawbacks. A warehouse for saltpeter, erected on a damp and isolated tract of riverbank, cannot easily be transformed into a rational, modern hospital building. Nor, when many of its patients are mentally fragile, can it be helpful that one of its most prominent wards is housed in what was once known as La Force, France’s most notorious women’s prison. Fear and grief still lingered in those walls.
Only sixty years before I arrived, the great Dr. Philippe Pinel had released the patients from their chains. This was a revolutionary action, for until that point the mad had been thought to be possessed by malevolent spirits. They could not be treated, it was supposed, but must be restrained. Pinel and others believed that madness was rather a kind of alienation from the true self (which is why we used to refer to the mentally ill as “aliénés”). The new “moral treatment,” by appealing to what was left of the patients’ reason,