Arles seen from the Wheatfields, July 1888
Le Petit Marseillais, Wednesday 26 December 1888:
Local news, Arles: Christmas Eve was favoured by very mild weather. The heavy rain which had been falling continuously for four days stopped completely and everyone was eager to run out to get treats or fulfil their religious duties. As a result, there were many people in the streets and even more in the churches. And everywhere it was remarkably calm and peaceful. The police, who finished doing their rounds at 5.00 in the morning, did not have a single case of drunkenness on the streets.1
It was still dark outside as Joseph d’Ornano, the chief of police, sat down to his first cup of coffee of the morning on Monday 24 December 1888. It was his favourite time of day. Already the station was alive with activity. From his window looking over the courtyard he watched the horseback patrol and the city police set off on their rounds.2 The previous few days had been blighted by continuous rain and particularly quiet, but Monday dawned sunny and mild.3 In just a few hours they would all sit down to enjoy their communal feast. It was the perfect start to the Christmas holidays.
On the chief of police’s walnut desk the paperwork from the night before awaited his attention. Apart from the routine list of brawls and domestic disputes, one report stood out. Just before midnight on Sunday 23 December, something very strange had happened on the rue Bout d’Arles. This street was at the heart of the red-light district and almost every one of its twelve houses was either a working brothel or a lodging house for prostitutes.4 As he began reading, Joseph d’Ornano examined the small package, messily bundled in newspaper, that accompanied the report. What took place in Arles that night was so unusual, and so utterly bewildering, that everyone involved would recall it until the day they died.
At around 11.45 p.m. a local policeman doing his rounds had been called to one of the town’s official brothels, the House of Tolerance no. 1, situated just inside the walls of the city on the corner of rue des Glacières and rue Bout d’Arles. There had been a commotion involving a man, and a girl had fainted. The man lived just across the road from the police station, so the chief inspector asked his assistant to send someone over to the house. At around 7.15 a.m. a gendarme was dispatched.5
The side of the house on the main road faced east and this part of the building caught the very first rays of winter sunshine. There were no shutters on the windows at street level and, as dawn was breaking, the gendarme peered inside. No one appeared to be home. The ground-floor room was modestly furnished with a table, several chairs and a couple of easels. At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Yet slowly, as the morning light became stronger, the gendarme noticed a pile of soiled rags on the floor and dark spots and splashes splattered across the walls. He returned to his superior to report his findings.
The chief of police had only recently taken up his post in Arles and the short, portly forty-five-year-old Corsican had quickly earned a reputation for being honest and fair.6 Joseph d’Ornano listened carefully to the young policeman, before dismissing him. Leaning back in his chair he glanced at the package wrapped in newspaper lying on his desk. This particular incident would warrant his own special attention. Donning his bowler hat and picking up his cane, the chief left the office and accompanied by two gendarmes crossed the road to 2, place Lamartine.
By the time he arrived on the scene, a small group of locals had gathered and the morning air was bristling with gossip and curiosity. The policemen opened the door. Inside it was eerily quiet. There was an acrid smell that struck them on entering – the unique combination of oil paint and turpentine. The room doubled as kitchen and painter’s studio: on one side were brightly coloured canvases stacked against the wall, brushes in jars, half-used tubes of oil paint, paint-smeared rags and a large mirror propped on one of the easels; on the other side was a burner with an enamel coffee pot, cheap earthenware crockery, a pipe and loose tobacco, and on the windowsill a spent oil lamp, as if someone had been expected back late.7 Although there was gas lighting in the house, it was turned off citywide at midnight. The place still held the gloom of night-time and the easels threw shadows across the red-tiled floor.
The room was in complete disarray. Rags were strewn all over the floor, blotted with dark-brown stains. More dark stains were on the terracotta tiles, and a trail of drops led to the blue wooden door that opened onto a hallway. The vestibule had a brown front door that led to a narrow staircase. Early in the morning only the barest sliver of light from the large upstairs window pierced the shutter and lit the stairwell. Holding onto the metal banister, Chief d’Ornano began to climb the stairs. There were rust-coloured stains mottling the wall, as if someone had accidentally dropped a loaded paintbrush to the floor. At the top of the landing there was a single entry to the right. The chief of police pulled the door towards him and entered a cramped, attic-like room, shrouded in darkness.8
He ordered a gendarme to open the shutters, and light from the street flooded into the bedroom. Behind the door there was a double bed made of cheap pine.9 In a corner a washbasin and jug stood on a table, with a small shaving mirror on the wall above. There were a few paintings on the walls: a couple of portraits and a landscape. Unlike the room downstairs, here there were no obvious signs of disorder. Half-hidden under the dishevelled bedding was the body of a man. His legs were drawn towards his chest and his head slumped to one side in a foetal position, his face shrouded by a pile of rags. The mattress was heavily stained and dark blooms of blood spread on the pillows next to the man’s head.10 The victim, as the local newspaper later put it, showed ‘no signs of life’.
Joseph d’Ornano walked across the room and opened the door into the adjoining guest bedroom. There was a large Gladstone bag half-open on a chair, as if the guest was on the point of leaving. On the walls hung several paintings in a brilliant yellow hue, which even in the depths of winter brightened the room.11 The blue blanket, plump pillows and folded white sheets indicated that the bed had not been slept in overnight.12 Signalling to his fellow policemen that he had seen enough, the chief pulled the door to and, walking past the body, made his way back downstairs. In the small, quiet town news of a crime started to spread.
* * *
Around 8 a.m. on that Christmas Eve morning, almost exactly the hour that Joseph d’Ornano was inspecting the guest bedroom in the Yellow House, an imposing middle-aged man was seen walking across the park. He wore a long woollen overcoat and had the bearing and elegance of a gentleman. As he strode past the porte de la Cavalerie and across the public gardens, he could hear the muted sounds of excited voices in the distance. The sounds got louder as he walked purposefully in their direction. When he reached place Lamartine and the little house he shared with his fellow painter, he saw a large crowd amassing in the street.
For the chief of police, it was an open-and-shut case. Faced with the scene – the bloody rags, blood-spattered walls, a body and a missing lodger – he could come to only one conclusion: the eccentric red-haired painter had been killed. Joseph d’Ornano didn’t have to look too far for the culprit because, as luck would have it, he was walking directly towards him across the square.
Upon reaching the Yellow House that bright Christmas Eve morning of 1888, the artist Paul Gauguin was arrested for the murder of Vincent van Gogh.13