Chapter Sixteen
Fat and Thin
(1887–1888)
Emile Zola was a large man, and he rapidly was getting larger. Known to friend and foe (but especially foe) as “The Bear,” he had a certain bearlike, lumbering appearance that was becoming more pronounced with the years.
He had been, by his own admission, an unrepentant glutton, and once told Goncourt that food was “the only thing that matters; nothing else really exists for me.”1 And then, something happened. His forty-six-inch waistline became unbearable, and he suddenly felt that he was growing old. Old and fat. And so he went on a diet—a rather strange diet that involved drinking no liquid with meals. But it seemed to work for Zola. He lost thirty pounds in three months, and Goncourt reported that the fellow had changed so much that he did not even recognize him.
But that was not the only change that now came over Zola, for with his loss of weight came a new interest in women, especially younger women. Until then, he had regularly bored his friends with his praise for monogamy and faithfulness. “I am happy with my wife,” he told them. “What more do I want?”2 A great deal more, as it turned out. As the 1880s drew to a close, Zola was approaching fifty and feeling mortality closing in. It was now that he took note of his wife’s beautiful young chambermaid, Jeanne Rozerot. Goncourt later faulted Madame Zola for employing such an attractive chambermaid, but by that time it was too late. Rozerot succumbed, and Zola promptly fell madly and giddily in love, installing her in a Paris apartment near his (on the Rue de Bruxelles, 9th) and showering her with gifts. He also gave her two children—a girl, Denise, and a boy, Jacques—thus ending any speculation about his own fertility.3
Shadow puppet of Emile Zola created by Henri Rivière (1864–1951) and Jules Depaquit (1872–1924) for the Théâtre du Chat Noir in 1894. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
“Fat Zola pretended to be a chaste, austere moralist,” Daudet’s elder son, Léon, later wrote. “Thin Zola let himself go.”4 As a consequence, his domestic life became a standard joke in certain literary circles.
* * *
“Fat” and “thin” are of course relative terms, and “thin,” as the late nineteenth century understood it, had nowhere near the same meaning as today. In contrast to the fulsome hourglass figures admired at the time, Sarah Bernhardt—whose portraits show a pleasingly slim and elegant woman—was considered to be thin to the point of skinny. She made fun of herself, on one occasion laughingly declining an umbrella by proclaiming, “Oh, I am so thin I cannot get wet! I pass between the drops.”5 But her detractors (of whom there were many) could be downright nasty about it. Cartoonists portrayed her as a scrawny-legged chicken, or as one acquaintance put it, a “little stick with the sponge on the top”6—the latter being a reference to her mop of curly red hair, which tended to frizz.
Berthe Morisot, despite her smoldering beauty, was also considered by some to be unpleasantly thin. Manet’s 1873 painting of her, called Repose, shows an unquestionably beautiful woman reclining against a sofa, her skirts spread gracefully around her. To the twenty-first-century eye, this woman seems perfectly well padded, but a bevy of critics were quick to disparage what they called her matchstick-like arms, as well as the objectionable seductiveness of her pose.7
Of course, neither of the Manet brothers agreed with Morisot’s critics, and Bernhardt’s slenderness never seemed to bother her bevy of ardent admirers. The secret, as Bernhardt learned from a dear friend, was simply to accept and enjoy being herself. “You are original without trying to be so,” a friend told her. Bernhardt’s hair, her slimness, and the “natural harp” in her throat made her “a creature apart, which is a crime of high treason against all that is commonplace.”8
Bernhardt responded characteristically, thanking her friend and profiting from her advice. “I armed myself for the struggle,” she later wrote in her memoirs, making up her mind “not to weep over the base things that were said about me, and not to suffer any more injustices.”9
Sarah Bernhardt would always be a fighter.
* * *
At the same time that Zola was falling head over heels in love, Edmond de Goncourt quite unexpectedly found himself in the midst of an autumnal love affair. Although there had been women in his life, he once noted that he had never been seriously in love and therefore was under a disadvantage in attempting to describe it. And then, during the spring of 1887, a certain beautiful young woman in his circle unexpectedly reciprocated his interest, and before long he found himself tremulously on the brink of proposing marriage.
Yet he was sadly torn. On the one hand, he envisioned spending his last years surrounded by this beautiful young woman’s affection. On the other hand, he remembered the devotion he had given to a life of literature, and his determination to use his fortune to found and endow a literary academy that would give recognition to the best authors of contemporary literature. This academy was no light dream for Goncourt, conceived as it was as a memorial to his brother and as a way to perpetuate the Goncourt name. There was also the sensitive matter of the official and tradition-bound Académie Française, whose rarified company Goncourt had long before given up hope of joining. His academy would recognize and reward the creators of modern literature that the Académie Française persisted in overlooking.
Why Goncourt believed his lady love would divert him from his literary commitment is not entirely clear. Of course he may have been rightfully concerned about her getting her delicate hands on his considerable fortune. But perhaps his dithering was simply an excuse to evade the state of marriage, which he had successfully avoided all his life. In any case, he was fierce about his commitments, as he saw them. “I must carry on to the bitter end,” he wrote in April 1887. “I must keep the promise I made to my brother, I must found that Academy we thought of together.” And then, in May, he wrote, “I really must have a strong will not to send my Academy packing!”10
He set to work convincing himself of his beloved’s unsuitability, noting that her mind was “rather babyish” and her attraction “purely sensual.” Worse yet, he occasionally caught glimpses of the woman she would become once her beauty faded. And then there was always the question of why such a lovely young thing would be interested in an old codger like himself. It was at moments like these that Goncourt thought he could perceive in her blue eyes the “iron determination” of a woman out to get a husband.11
Not put off, she came to visit. Distraught at his own vulnerability, Goncourt did not even dare to descend and greet her. Instead, he shut himself up in his room and sent a message that he had left the day before and not returned. It did not take much more of this sort of behavior to convince the young woman to look elsewhere. In great relief, Goncourt indulged in some gentle self-recrimination, but reassured himself that it was all for the best. After all, it would not be kind for someone of his age and delicate health to take a young wife. And of course, he owed it to the future of his academy.
Simultaneously with Goncourt’s dramatic renunciation of late-blooming love came a literary event, his first Journal publication. Originally, he had decided that nothing from his journals would appear in print until twenty years after his death, and had even kept their existence a secret. But in a weak moment he shared his secret with Daudet, who encouraged him to publish. Goncourt then decided to go ahead and issue the earliest entries, those written with Jules all those years before. Extracts from the first volume (shorn of those portions that might cause undue indignation or even litigation) appeared in Le Figaro in late 1886 and stirred little comment except for a complaint from Princess Mathilde, who was disturbed to find anything in it that was not of the heroic mold. More disturbing was the reception to the first volume’s publication, in the spring of 1887. Le Figaro attacked it for its egocentricity, while the Academician, philosopher, and critic Hippolyte Taine became alarmed at what the next volume might bring and wrote Goncourt begging him not to quote him on anything whatever.
“Oh, what a rabbit, what a coward, what a poltroon that fellow Taine is!” Goncourt exclaimed, making sure to include the most damaging portions of Taine’s letter for future publication.12 Yet as annoying as Taine’s response was, it was better than the general disinterest that greeted publication of the Journal’s first volume. Goncourt resolved to expect better from future Journal publications, but neither the second volume (October 1887) nor the third (spring 1888) brought much in the way of sales or praise. Like so much of his literary career to date, they were yet another disappointment.
* * *
While Goncourt was suffering painful reverses in literature and love, Debussy continued to suffer from boredom and rejection at the Villa Médicis. In early 1887, he was hard at work on an orchestral piece “of special colour” that he was calling Printemps. This was not program music, he emphasized to his bookseller correspondent, Emile Baron: “I have nothing but contempt for music organized according to one of those leaflets they’re so careful to provide you with as you come into the concert hall.” Instead, Debussy “wanted to express the slow, laborious birth of beings and things in nature, then the mounting florescence and finally a burst of joy at being reborn to a new life.”13
Unfortunately, his composition met with a chilly reception, including a warning against “this vague impressionism which is one of the most dangerous enemies of truth in the world of art.”14 This appears to be the earliest recorded use of the term “impressionism” in association with Debussy’s music, a term that Debussy would in fact reject. Indeed, Debussy attributed his inspiration for Printemps to Botticelli’s Primavera.
But Debussy’s disgust went far deeper than a disagreement over descriptive terminology. In March 1887, he left the Villa Médicis for good. He had completed the required two years and was not about to stay for the expected third year. “Ever since I’ve been here I feel dead inside,” he wrote Vasnier, begging him not to be too hard on him. “Your friendship’s the only thing I’ll have left.”15
Despite these fervent assurances, Debussy lost interest in the Vasniers within a few months after returning to Paris. He continued for a while to come to their home for meals, advice, and loans, and his affair with Madame Vasnier may have sporadically continued during this time. One of the Vasniers’ friends in fact retained a vivid memory of Debussy climbing a rope ladder to Madame’s room during a family holiday that summer in Dieppe. But with Debussy’s attention increasingly taken elsewhere, his affair with Madame Vasnier (and his somewhat puzzling friendship with her husband) finally ceased.
* * *
Berthe Morisot’s circle of friends, as well as her career, was growing. In early 1887 she showed five paintings in an avant-garde salon in Brussels, followed by participation in a well-publicized exhibition with Georges Petit, where her works were displayed along with those by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Rodin, and Whistler.
She sold nothing, but there were consolations. By this time she had established firm friendships with Monet, Renoir, and Degas—even though Degas himself was rarely on speaking terms with either Monet or Renoir. In so doing, she was reaching well outside her prescribed social group among the haute bourgeoisie to include members of the distinctly middle class (Monet) and even working class (Renoir), both of whom were especially welcome guests in her home—although Renoir did not dare introduce his longtime mistress to the Manets until 1890, after they wed. Julie was a favorite with Renoir, and in 1887 Berthe and Eugène asked Renoir to paint Julie’s portrait.
Monet probably had the widest circle of friends in the group, ranging from Clemenceau, Zola, Morisot, and Rodin to James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. Before the 1887 Georges Petit exhibition, Morisot prevailed upon Monet to ask Rodin to advise her on a bust of Julie that she wanted to exhibit. She and Eugène visited Giverny, and by 1889, after many years of growing friendship, she at last felt free to write Monet and ask, “My dear Monet, may I drop the ‘dear Sir,’ and treat you as a friend?”16
The poet Stéphane Mallarmé was another close friend of the Morisot-Manet family, and during the summer of 1887, Berthe, Eugène, and Julie vacationed with the Mallarmé family in Valvins, just outside of Paris. They would spend many other pleasant hours with him, and in time Morisot would appoint him, Degas, and Renoir as joint guardians of Julie. But her own death was far from her mind as she painted Julie, gave her lessons, and took her on strolls through Paris and—on one occasion—Amsterdam. “Although she likes painting,” Morisot noted of Julie, who was seven years old at the time of the Amsterdam trip, “museums bore her; she keeps tugging at me all the time to get it over with as soon as possible, and to be taken for a walk in the country.”17
Morisot also entertained an ever-widening circle of friends that now included a number of prominent musicians, writers, and artists. She enjoyed these regular dinners, but they were especially useful in amusing Eugène, who by the winter of 1887–1888 had become ill. In addition to her other obligations, Morisot now had a semi-invalid to care for. No, she sadly wrote Mallarmé, they would be unable to join them in Valvins again during the summer of 1888. “We make this decision after much thought,” she told him, “having many reasons that are as sensible as they are dreary for remaining in Paris.”18
* * *
Despite dinner parties, concerts, café life, and illicit love affairs, which continued much as usual, life was filled with uncertainty for all classes of Parisians in the late 1880s. With Jules Ferry’s fall from office, France entered an unsettling era of ministerial instability, intensified by a continued weak economy and the social unrest that accompanied it. Strikes were erupting, most notably in the southwestern portion of the Massif Central, where the coal miners of Decazeville had captured national attention. Soon after this brutal strike erupted, Louise Michel—who had been freed from prison in 1885 after the death of her mother—was arrested once again after she spoke at a Paris public meeting on behalf of the striking miners. Her fellow speakers were released after appealing the court’s decision, but Michel refused to appeal her four-month sentence. Embarrassed by her defiant position, the government at length simply pardoned and released her. But the social and economic turbulence continued, as did Michel’s ringing speeches on behalf of the suffering poor.
“Do you take part in every demonstration that occurs?” the prosecutor had asked at her 1883 trial. Her reply still held true: “Unfortunately, yes,” she had answered. “I am always on the side of the wretched!”19
* * *
Once again Zola successfully mirrored his times, having published Germinal—his great novel about striking miners—in 1885, when strikes were beginning to break out in Belgium and northern France. Ostensibly Germinal, like the rest of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, takes place during the Second Empire, with the instigator of the novel’s great revolt being the son of L’assommoir’s wretched Gervaise Lantier. But despite Zola’s intent, Germinal more accurately reflected the turmoil and upheaval of the Third Republic of the late 1880s. Revolutionary ideas were percolating throughout French society, from intellectuals to workers, and indeed, Germinal’s Etienne Lantier—a destitute workman from the slums of Montmartre—educates himself by reading the literature of class struggle, including Marx.
Germinal not only sold well (reviving Zola’s waning book sales following Nana) but also established Zola as a leading spokesperson for the downtrodden. Indeed, his prescient depiction of the stuff of future headlines gave fodder to friend and foe alike, who claimed that Germinal was responsible for the rash of strikes that was sweeping France.
Of course, the rising threat of strikes and insurrection did more than buoy Germinal’s sales. As frequently happens during times of crisis, a hero—or supposed hero—emerges. France’s hero of the moment was a military man, General Georges Boulanger, who began his dizzying rise by captivating Clemenceau into securing for him the position of minister for war. Clemenceau and his fellow radical republicans were persuaded that Boulanger was a man of their own left-wing political persuasions who could be depended upon to attack royalist influence in the army. What Boulanger in fact turned out to be was an incipient despot with the theatrical know-how to appeal to the widest possible spectrum, from monarchists to the mob.
Even before Boulanger emerged, one perceptive visitor to Paris had noted that the Republic seemed to be “at the end of its tether” and gloomily predicted that “next year we shall have revolutionary excesses and then a violent reaction,” with the eventual emergence of “some kind of dictatorship.”20 But few at first perceived that Boulanger might be the personification of this threat. Indeed, Boulanger’s army reforms, which had a democratic tilt, pleased a wide swath of public opinion, while his strong anti-German leanings appealed mightily to simmering French nationalism and France’s desire for revenge.
Despite Boulanger’s undeniable appeal, the French moderate and right-wing republicans grew alarmed over his anti-German initiatives, including a proposed ultimatum that they feared might push Bismarck into a preventive war. Although still divided on the question of religion and laicization, moderates and conservatives drew together to oust the current government, including Boulanger, from power. Unfortunately this move, although successful in depriving Boulanger of his governmental position, only fanned the flames of his popularity higher. In a May 1887 Parisian by-election, more than thirty-eight thousand voters added Boulanger’s name to their voting slips, while in July, huge crowds of Boulanger’s supporters—drawn heavily from the working class—turned up to prevent his departure from Paris on military assignment.
At this point, Clemenceau suddenly saw the dangers of a military man who was too popular. “This popularity,” he told the Chamber, “has come too fast for someone who likes noise too much, or, to be more just, who does not elude it enough.”21 But events continued to unfold in Boulanger’s favor. The president’s son-in-law was caught purchasing favors in return for Legion of Honor decorations. Responding to the scandal, Clemenceau brought down yet another government, but the extent of the corruption badly undercut the Republic’s foundations. Right and Left—royalists and radicals, Bonapartists and former Communards—now joined with fervid nationalists of all stripes (including a large number of the working class who were dead set against the influx of foreign workers) to promote Boulanger and destroy what they viewed as a corrupt and opportunistic Republic. What Boulanger truly thought, no one really knew, but all parties were willing to take a chance on this man of the moment, who in turn seemed delighted with the support of anyone who came his way.
In the spring of 1888, the government at last used Boulanger’s political activities as grounds to dismiss him from the army. This in turn made him eligible to run for Parliament. Winning a seat in the Chamber of Deputies (using an American-style campaign, complete with gimcracks bearing the likeness of “the brave general”), he wasted no time in calling for dissolution of the Assembly and a revision of the constitution. The idea was to provide for a new Constituent Assembly—a plan that the general’s supporters quietly hoped would increase their portion of the political spoils. Virtually none but royalists supported the motion, which was handily defeated.
By this time tempers were getting hot in the Chamber, and after clashing with the prime minister, Charles Floquet—who accused Boulanger of wanting to be another Bonaparte—Boulanger met Floquet on the field of battle in what looked like a complete mismatch. Unexpectedly, the sixty-year-old Floquet managed his end of the duel well, wounding the general in the neck. Fortunately for Boulanger, the wound was not fatal, and soon he was back in action.
But now, with by-elections coming up in early 1889, Boulanger had another goal in mind—winning an electoral victory in Paris. It was a difficult time for those who feared what was coming, and Puvis de Chavannes, writing to Berthe Morisot (who was in Nice for Eugène’s health), described Paris that winter as “restless and toss[ing] about like a sick man.” Renoir, too, was disturbed by the prospects. His eyes were giving him trouble, he told Morisot, but “we shall talk about General Boulanger when I can write without tears falling on my paper.”22
* * *
While General Boulanger was doing his best to undermine the Republic, work was beginning on the extraordinary structure that was intended to become the star of the 1889 Paris World Exposition—Gustave Eiffel’s tower.
In January 1887, work on Eiffel’s tower began, first by going downward—an essential step that Bourdais, with all his refined asceticism, had overlooked. Since two of the tower’s four feet stood on unstable land near the Seine, Eiffel probed fifty feet downward until he reached solid clay. He then sent huge sealed and electrically lit caissons seventy feet downward, well below water level, with workers breathing compressed air as they excavated (a system that he had successfully tested while building bridges). When all the enormous foundation blocks were in place and the equally huge anchoring bolts were inserted, Eiffel was ready to go up. This first essential step had taken him little more than five months.
But soon after work began on the tower, a wave of opposition emerged. Eiffel’s tower was about to go up on the Champ de Mars, where it would visually dominate Paris. A number of Paris’s leading citizens, including Charles Garnier, were appalled at the idea of this “monstrosity” blighting their view. A Committee of Three Hundred quickly formed (one member for each meter of the tower’s height), whose roster included some of the most celebrated artists, musicians, and writers in Paris. Led by Garnier, the Committee shot off a “Protestation des Artistes” to the exhibition’s commissioner. As “enthusiastic lovers of beauty,” they wished to warn him in the strongest possible terms against erecting this “useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower.” Such an eyesore, they predicted, would dishonor and devastate Paris, dominating it like a “gigantic black factory chimney.”23
Garnier and Eiffel had worked together in apparent harmony on the huge observatory in Nice, which had been successfully completed the year before. Eiffel had of course used sheet iron for his part of the project, but although Garnier was perfectly willing to accept iron as a structural element, he was not willing to accept it as an artistic component in its own right. Like Jules Bourdais (Eiffel’s rival in the competition to build the tower), Garnier was unquestionably traditional and favored stone as the perfect building material. In addition, both he and Bourdais were architects, and they regarded an engineer like Eiffel as a “mere” technician, incapable of creating works of beauty. But ultimately, it may have been Garnier’s realization that Eiffel’s tower would become the highlight of the exposition that most fueled his resentment. What seems to have especially galled Garnier was the probability that this tower would eclipse his own contribution—an interesting but comparatively unspectacular row of more than thirty buildings, from cave dwellings to a Persian mansion, illustrating the history of habitation. (Garnier was right. His “History of Habitation” was razed at the exposition’s end, and virtually no one today remembers it.)
Eiffel’s response to Garnier and the Committee was dignified but firm. Of course engineers have taste, he replied. Of course engineers appreciate beauty. Conversely, the aesthetic predilections of writers and artists are not infallible. Indeed, Eiffel firmly believed in the beauty of the laws of nature with which engineers work and the harmony of design that results from abiding by and respecting these laws. Did these writers and artists think that only richly decorated stone structures could embody beauty? He—and his much-maligned tower—would show them otherwise. And then he set about to prove it.
By July 1887, Eiffel’s tower actually began to rise—a step for which he and his nearby Levallois-Perret firm were well prepared. As with his previous projects, Eiffel first had drawings made of each of the tower’s component parts, with the impact of gravity and wind on these parts precisely calculated. Then he had each one of these parts individually produced under his workshop’s controlled conditions, including carefully drilled rivet holes, drilled to a tenth of a millimeter. These in turn were preassembled in manageable sections. At Eiffel’s insistence, no drilling or adaptation was allowed on-site; if a part was defective, it was sent back to the workshop. In all, some eighteen thousand prefabricated sections were eventually delivered to the tower site, forming a sort of gigantic and perfect erector set—the classic children’s toy that in fact was eventually created based on Eiffel’s famed methods.
Yet as Eiffel’s tower went up, the criticism continued. Fearmongers predicted that the structure would inevitably collapse. After all, no one had ever attempted anything quite like this before, even if some of Eiffel’s bridges had been equally daring. But if many people were uncomfortable with Eiffel’s design and especially with his chosen material, Eiffel certainly was not. In fact he had, after much consideration, deliberately chosen iron rather than lighter-weight steel for this enormous structure. His decision was based in part on steel’s costliness but also, and more importantly, on its greater elasticity, or “give,” under high winds—an elasticity that Eiffel believed would be excessive for weather conditions on the Champ de Mars. As for the structure’s weight, Eiffel’s tower would prove to be surprisingly light. Its latticework design and attention to distributed weight-load (per square centimeter it amounts to something like the weight of a man sitting in a chair) make its 7,300 tons, if not exactly feather light, certainly an amazing achievement. Well-grounded, light on its feet, and perfectly calibrated for wind tolerance and all other forms of stress and strain, this tower was not about to collapse or tip over, as its detractors warned.
Then what about the cost? The City of Paris and the French government had anted up only 1,500,000 francs, which barely covered a quarter of the projected construction costs. In response, Eiffel had set up a company to distribute shares, half of which he retained in his own name and paid for out of his personal funds. It was an enormous risk, and the City of Paris and the French government figured that Eiffel was headed for a major loss.
But even riskier was another huge endeavor, the Panama Canal project, which was about to encompass Eiffel, even as his tower was heading skyward.
* * *
By 1884, the Panama Canal venture that had begun so promisingly was running into trouble. Death (primarily yellow fever) stalked everyone on the site, including a rapid succession of directors of works. The main contracting company, which had built its reputation with the Suez Canal, wanted to get out. This left construction in the hands of a plethora of individual companies, with the not-unexpected result of inefficiency, duplication, and complete lack of coordination. In addition, there were torrential rains and a challenging terrain to contend with, leading to one disaster after another. Waste and mismanagement were rife, and funds were running out. In response, de Lesseps maneuvered to get another government-sponsored bond lottery. The government reluctantly granted its authorization (the project had already eaten up 615 million francs), but only on the condition that locks be used, as Gustave Eiffel had originally advised. Instead of a sea-level waterway, the new plan would be for a canal with locks—at triple the original estimated cost.
And so in late 1887, as the four great piers of Eiffel’s tower were dramatically rising to meet at the first platform, de Lesseps sent several financiers to Eiffel to ask him to step in and rescue the Panama project. Eiffel agreed, “in the national interest,” to construct ten huge hydraulically operated locks, each capable of accommodating the largest ships then in use. By now Eiffel was a recognized giant in his field, but at fifteen times the cost of his tower, this was the largest and riskiest project he had ever undertaken.
* * *
Early in 1888, as the Boulanger crisis was heating up and Gustave Eiffel had embarked on saving the Panama Canal, Vincent van Gogh left Paris for Arles, in Provence. He was exhausted by his two years in Paris, having painted more than two hundred pictures and participated in the city’s vigorous artistic life. That autumn, in response to repeated invitations, Paul Gauguin came to join him in Arles—in the barely furnished Yellow House, which van Gogh had decorated with paintings of sunflowers.
Unfortunately, this experiment in joint living and painting, begun with such eager hope and expectation, did not go well. To begin with, all the hope and expectation lay with Vincent. Gauguin had not wanted to come and only agreed to the plan after Théo van Gogh, who had been financially supporting Gauguin as well as Vincent, insisted that Gauguin join Vincent in Arles. Once there, the two artists split up the household duties readily enough, but—not surprisingly for artists of their intensity—quarreled repeatedly about art. In mid-December, Gauguin wrote Théo that “Vincent and I simply cannot live together without trouble, due to the incompatibility of our temperaments.” Vincent, too, noted that their discussions of paintings left “our heads as exhausted as a used electric battery.”24
In addition to stress from this increasingly unworkable living arrangement, Vincent had recently received word of Théo’s plans to marry. “It seems quite possible,” writes art historian John Rewald, “that Vincent—always extremely possessive in his affections—feared that he might thus lose some of his brother’s solicitude, since Théo would soon have a family of his own.”25 Whether or not this particular piece of news contributed to Vincent’s mental instability, the situation as a whole was undeniably volcanic, with an eruption imminent. The end came when, in late December, van Gogh took that infamous razor to his ear, prompting Gauguin to take to his heels.
Several years afterward, Gauguin recalled in his memoirs that he had left for a walk and heard Vincent’s footsteps behind him. Turning, he saw Vincent coming after him with an open razor. Gauguin stared Vincent into backing off and then spent the night in a hotel, only to learn the next morning that Vincent had returned to the Yellow House, where he had cut off his ear (how much of the ear is subject to debate). Gauguin then telegraphed Théo and returned to Paris. But immediately after he returned to Paris, Gauguin had told a friend a significantly different version of the story, one in which no mention was made of Vincent coming after him with a razor. In this first version, the razor appeared only after Vincent returned to the Yellow House, where he had mutilated himself.
Naturally, this incident and its mysteries have attracted considerable attention over the years, and recent revision to the legend has van Gogh going after Gauguin with the razor and Gauguin, in self-defense, slicing off van Gogh’s ear with a fencing sword. But whoever did what to whom, the fact remains that Gauguin immediately bolted for Paris. Van Gogh was hospitalized briefly before returning to the Yellow House and then to a mental hospital in nearby Saint-Rémy. There he would continue to paint, and Théo would continue to provide for him.
Although Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin subsequently corresponded, they never saw one another again.
* * *
In a final violent ending to the year, Louise Michel barely escaped assassination while speaking in Le Havre. Her would-be assassin, a Catholic fanatic by the name of Pierre Lucas, fired a pistol at her and wounded her in the head.
Fortunately, she survived the attack, although the doctors were unable to remove the bullet—an outcome that left her in uncertain health. Yet despite Lucas’ intent and her head wound, she acted quickly to protect him from the angry crowd. Later, she refused to lodge a complaint against him and instead pleaded for him at his trial, arguing that he was the victim of an evil society. The man was acquitted.
Michel lived by her principles, even in the most dire of circumstances. For her, every human being had value.
Besides, her contempt for the police was well known.