Ted Morgan

Ted Morgan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of biographies of FDR, Churchill, and Maugham, the last of which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America,...read more

Valley of Death
The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War

The following is reproduced with the permission of the author, Ted Morgan
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In 1947 Antonin Artaud the French art critic and playwright, whose entire life had been a struggle between the sometimes conflicting and sometimes allied forces of madness and artistic expression, published a slim volume about a kindred spirit. It was entitled Van Gogh, le suicide de la societe. The tone of the book, that of barely controlled fury, seemed to derive from Artaud's identification with the dead painter. Both men had suffered from sporadic attacks of mental illness and had been committed to institutions for the insane, Van Gogh voluntarily for about a year, Artaud against his will for nine years. Using Van Gogh's case as an example, Artaud announced that doctors were the natural enemies of artists. Artists were subversives who challenged a society's established values, while the doctors who treated them were the guardians of those values, their un-avowed mission to destroy the artist. Artaud's rambling indictment named as the villain in Van Gogh's death the last doctor to treat him. Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, who lived in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, about twenty miles from Paris. "If Van Gogh had not died at 37," Artaud wrote, "I don't need the Grim reaper to tell me with what supreme masterpieces painting would have been enriched...."Two days before his death, an evil spirit and improvised psychiatrist called Doctor Gachet was the direct, efficient, and sufficient cause of his death. "I have acquired, in reading Van Gogh's letters to his brother, the firm and sincere conviction that Dr. Gachet, psychiatrist, in reality hated Van Gogh as a painter, and above all as a genius." Artaud, more than fifty years removed from the event, had never met Dr. Gachet and did not have a shred of evidence to support his accusation. Dr. Gachet was known to have befriended and helped Van Gogh in the last period of his life and, when Vincent shot himself, it was Dr. Gachet who came to his bedside on a Sunday night and dress3ed his would. Nevertheless, Artaud had a manic intuition that Dr. Gachet was somehow the cause of Van Gogh's death. Is there any truth to Artaud's theory, or can it be dismissed as the distorted view of a man who had himself been mistreated by doctors? In 1888 Van Gogh was voluntarily committed to an asylum as the result of a violent scene with Gauguin and the partial mutilation of his left ear. His brother, Theo, arranged his admission to the sanitarium of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole on the outskirts of Saint-Remy-de Provence, an asylum described as "a private establishment devoted to the treatment of the insane of both sexes," In his letters to his brother, Vincent described the director, Dr. Peyron, as a gouty little widower who wore dark glasses; the treatment he used was based on hydrotherapy, and Vincent had many sessions in the bathtub during the year he spent in Dr. Peyron's institution. Vincent started working again at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. First he painted what he saw framed in the window of his cell, without the bars. In July he had a fit, and Dr. Peyron took away his brushes. Vincent asked his brother to tell D. Peyron that painting was necessary for him. When he improved, he was allowed to paint in the garden, surrounded by on-looking inmates, and in the countryside, accompanied by a guard. The periods of work were interrupted by fits and other forms of erratic behavior. Once, when the guard was walking behind him, Vincent turned around and kicked him in the stomach. Then he apologized, saying he thought the Arles police were after him. Dr. Peyron, in his report wrote on Van Gogh wrote; "He tried on several occasions to poison himself, either by swallowing the oil color he needed for painting, or by drinking kerosene which he stole from the boy when he was filling the lamps." One interpretation of Vincent's fits at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole- that they were connected to things in Theo's life- was advanced in 1953 by the French psychoanalyst Charles Mauron. Theo, who was working in Paris for the art gallery of Boussod and Valadon, had become engaged to a girl named Johanna Bonger. In the year that Vincent spent confined, Theo married Johanna and had a son by her, whom he named after his brother. Mauron established that the dates of Vincent's fits closely followed the arrival of letters from Theo announcing his marriage and the birth of his son. Mauron's explanation was that Vincent, who was totally dependent on Theo financially, and had formulated the following unconscious analysis: Theo is getting married and it is right that he should devote himself completely to his wife and child. But he is diverting part of his resources from his family to keep me going, and part of his affection in his support of me. This is not right, and I must not allow this situation to continue. But how can I change it, except by withdrawing from Theo's life, and how can I withdraw except by destroying myself?

Vincent had one crisis in January, 1890. and another in February, which lasted two months. He wrote Theo that he could not improve in the asylum, surrounded as he was by madmen. Their madness, he felt, was contagious. He asked Theo to find some other place where he might go, and Theo went to the painter Camille Pissarro for advice. Pissarro knew a doctor who specialized in nervous ailments and was friendly with the impressionist group. The doctor, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, had a house in the pleasant village of Auvers-sur-Oise where he had collected the works of Cezanne, Renoir, Manet, and other new painters. He himself painted under the pseudonym of of Van Ryssel. Just the man, thought Pissarro, who would understand Vincent's problems. Theo wrote Vincent on March 29: "I am very happy to be able to tell you that I met Dr. Gachet, that physician Pissarro mentioned to me. He looks like a man of understanding. He resembles you a bit....When I told him how your crises came about, he told me that he didn't believe it had anything to do with madness, and that if it was what he thought he could guarantee your recovery...." Vincent was delighted at the prospect of leaving the asylum and of being treated by a doctor, who, without even having met him, already thought he could cure his condition. He urged Theo to press for his release. In May, Theo wrote Dr. Gachet: "You had given me hope that under your care he might recover his normal state....I would be most grateful if you could find out about an inn or boarding house where he could stay if he came to Auvers." Vincent left Saint-Paul-de-Mausole on May 16 and went to the nearby town of Tarascon to take the train to Paris. Theo, so concerned about Vincent's traveling alone that he had spent a sleepless night, fetched him the next day at the Gare de Lyon and took him home to meet his infant nephew and namesake and his sister-in-law. Johanna was surprised at how healthy and vigorous he looked. She thought he was in better condition than Theo. Vincent wanted to leave for Auvers as soon as possible-Paris made him nervous-and, on May 19, with a letter of introduction from Theo, he arrived at Dr. Gachet's house, walking up the twenty-two front steps and waiting in a drawing room crowded with paintings, bric-a-brac and black antique furniture. Soon Dr. Gachet appeared, a short man of sixty-two with a long nose, a prominent chin, extraordinarily bright and darting eyes, and stiff red hair that stuck out from his head like the bristles in a hairbrush. Dr. Gachet told Vincent not to think about his illness, to work quietly, keep regular hours, and eat moderately. He was sanguine about Vincent's chances of recovery and prescribed no medication. He sent the patient to a nearby boarding house, but Vincent quickly found a more modest establishment on the Place de la Mairie, Chez Ravoux, where room and board was only 3 francs fifty a day. Two days later, Vincent wrote Theo and Jo: "I have seen Dr. Gachet, who gives me the impression of being rather eccentric, but his experience as a doctor must keep him balanced enough to combat the nervous trouble from which he certainly seems to be suffering as least as seriously as I. He piloted me to an inn where they ask 6 francs a day. All by myself I found one where I shall pay 3.50 fr. a day....the impression I got of him was not favorable. When he spoke of Belgium and the days of the old painters, his grief-hardened face grew smiling again, and I really think that I shall go on being friends with him and that I shall do his portrait. Then he said "I must work boldly on, and not think at all of what went wrong with me."

Vincent evidently wanted to show his brother, who in each of his letters enclosed a neatly folded fifty-franc bill, that he had found the cheapest pension possible. He always kept carefully itemized accounts, down to the last sou, to show Theo exactly where all of his money went. Far more interesting, however, was his first impression of Dr. Gachet. In the intervals between his fits, Vincent was completely lucid, and in his letters to Theo he showed a remarkable understanding on the personalities of others as well as his own. He was not in the habit of questioning the mental stability of the people he met, for he knew how precarious the balance of the mind could be. Still, after a single meeting with Dr. Gachet, Vincent was convinced that he, too, was unbalanced. What was there about Gachet to justify Vincent's judgment? Certainly, he was no ordinary doctor. Born in Lille in 1828, he was an early convert to homeopathy, the school of medicine that believes the cure of a disease is effected by minute doses of drugs capable of inducing symptoms similar to those of the disease being treated. He was outspoken in his low opinion of surgeons and organic medicine, but he completed his studies at the school of medicine in Montpellier, writing his thesis on melancholy. He then practiced in Paris, where he befriended painters, particularly the impressionists. Cezanne was his house guest in Auvers, and Manet, Pissarro, and Renoir were all close friends of his. In 1883, when Manet's leg became infected and his doctors recommended amputation, Dr. Gachet went to see him and said he could cure him without an operation. But before Gachet had a chance to demonstrate his curative powers, Manet's leg was amputated and he died ten days later. He did, however, treat Pissarro with homeopathic remedies, and Renoir had once asked him to treat a little girl, a model, who was suffering from tuberculosis. Dr. Gachet saw the child, but on February 25, 1889. Renoir wrote him: "Dear Doctor, the little girl you were kind enough to look after, unfortunately too late, has died. I am nonetheless grateful for the relief you brought her, although we were both convinced it was in vain." Homeopathic remedies were no more successful in saving Dr. Gachet's own wife, who died of tuberculosis in 1875, leaving him with a son and daughter. After her death he fell into periodic fits of despondence. Dr. Gachet seemed drawn to anything that was bizarre or extravagant. He was a free-thinker, a nonconformist, a lover of the new and the original. He founded the Society for Mutual Autopsy, whose members agreed to have their bodies cut open after their deaths and their vital organs examined. He tried in vain to recruit Renoir, telling him how important it would be for science to have a great artist's brain to inspect. He was involved in phrenology and palmistry. He invented anti-rheumatic and anti-constipation powders, and used electric shock treatment to cure urinary ailments. He thought of himself as an innovator and a specialist in nervous diseases. Perhaps part of his attraction to the impressionist movement was that it was dammed by the establishment of the day. This, in any case, was the man to whom Theo had confided his sick brother. In his second letter to Theo and Jo, around the end of May, Vincent wrote: "Today I saw Dr. Gachet again....He seems very sensible, but he is as discouraged about his job as a doctor as I am about my painting. Then I told him that I would gladly swap jobs with him. He said to me besides, that if the melancholy or anything else became too much for me to bear, he could easily do something to lessen its intensity, and that I must not feel awkward about being frank with him."

Dr. Gachet's treatment, although based mainly on infusions of optimism, seemed to be doing Vincent some genuine good. The doctor was against confinement and sensed that Vincent could best improve by living a normal life among other people and working as well as he could, which was very well indeed. Van Gogh had started painting at the age of twenty-seven; thus his entire career as a painter lasted only nine years, during which time he produced nine hundred paintings and a hundred drawings and water colors. The seventy days he spent in Auvers, the last seventy days of his life, were his most productive. He completed seventy paintings, an average of one a day, and thirty drawings. He would begin a new canvas before the previous one was dry, rising at dawn and trudging out into the Oise valley with his easel under his arm, returning punctually for meals with the other boarders, and retiring at nine to his whitewashed garret room on the third floor with its one dormer window. On Sunday, May 25, Dr. Gachet invited Vincent to lunch in the garden, after which the doctor handed him a dry point and a polished copper plate and sat as a model for the only Van Gogh etching in existence, Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet. Two days later, Vincent painted Dr. Gachet's garden. In the beginning of June he wrote his younger sister Wilhelmina in Holland: "I have found a true friend in Dr. Gachet, something like another brother, so much do we resemble each other physically and also mentally. He is a very nervous man himself and very queer in his behaviors...." Instead of being put off by the doctor's strange ways, Vincent considered them part of their bond. On June 4 Vincent wrote Theo, who had been faithfully sending him fifty franc notes, canvas, sketching paper and tubes of paint, that he was working on the doctor's portrait, "He certainly seems to me as ill or distraught as you or me," Vincent wrote, "and he is older and lost his wife several years ago, but he is very much the doctor, and his profession and faith still sustain him. We are great friends already....I am working at his portrait..." Dr. Gachet admired the portrait so much that he asked Vincent to make a second version, which was quite different from the first. It had, Vincent wrote Gauguin, with whom he was reconciled after the falling out at Arles, "the heart-broken expression of our time." The doctor, who had a theory for everything, told Vincent that he understood his work by virtue of his own study of natural history. Vincent, as he saw it, was a Dutch Rousseau who celebrated nature, producing a peasant art made of wooden clogs that was nevertheless as refined as Japanese art. When he saw Vincent's Arlesienne, Dr. Gachet, after some hesitation, exclaimed: "How difficult it is to be simple!" In the June 4 letter Vincent mentioned Dr. Gachet's pretty blonde daughter, Marguerite, for the first time: "I shall most probably also do the portrait of his daughter, who is nineteen years old, and with whom I imagine Jo would soon be friends." Vincent was feeling good and working well, like a highly volatile substance that a chemist has succeeded in stabilizing. "I also hope that this feeling I have of being much more master of my brush than before I went to Arles will last," he wrote in the same letter, "And Dr. Gachet says that he thinks it most improbable that it [his illness] will return, and that things are going quite well,....Altogether, father Gachet is very, yes very like you and me....I feel that he understands us perfectly and that he will work for you and me to the best of his power, without any reserve, for the love of art for art's sake." For Vincent, Dr. Gachet had become the indispensible man, the healer who understood him and made his work possible.

As for Dr. Gachet, he too was convinced that his curative powers would work on Vincent. "Dr. Gachet came to see me yesterday." Theo wrote his brother on June 5, "but at any rate he told me that he thought you entirely recovered, and that he did not see any reason for a return of your malady." On June 8 Theo, Jo, and their son came to Auvers to spend the day, and the infant Vincent played in Dr. Gachet's yard with the numerous dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons, rabbits and geese. It was a pleasant Sunday outing, with Vincent relaxed and surrounded by his real and surrogate families. In the days that followed, Vincent was so absorbed in his work that he did not write Theo again until the end of June to describe a new portrait: "Yesterday and the day before I painted Mlle. Gachet's portrait, which I hope you will see soon; the dress is red, the wall in in the background green with orange spots, the carpet red with green spots, the piano dark violet; it is 40 inches high by 20 inches wide. It is a figure that I enjoyed painting-but it is difficult. He [Gachet] has promised to make her pose for me another time at the small organ." And then this period of intense work and tranquility ended. Vincent's peace of mind was shattered by a letter Theo sent on June 30. "We have gone through a period of the greatest anxiety." Theo wrote, "Our dear little boy has been very ill....at present we do not know what we ought to do. There are problems....the rats Boussod and Valadon are treating me as though I had just entered their business, and are keeping me on a short allowance." Misfortune was piling up on Theo from several directions. He was thinking of setting himself up as an independent art dealer, but that would make his financial situation even more precarious. However, he promised Vincent to keep him going. Once again Vincent was reminded that he was entirely dependent on Theo's support. The letter, although it did not contain a single word of reproach, reminded Vincent of his great dilemma: the only thing he could do was paint, but he could not sell his paintings; and Theo and Jo had to scrimp and save so that Vincent could continue with his painting. As Mauron suggested, events in Theo's life tended to precipitate Vincent's crises. And so it was after the June 30 letter. One of the many works by artist friends that Dr. Gachet kept in disorderly piles in the rooms and corridors of his house was a painting by Armand Guillaumin of a woman, naked to the waist, lying on a bed and holding a little Japanese fan. Vincent admired Guillaumin. He had visited his studio on the Quai d'Anjou, where once, to emphasize a point in an argument, he had undressed and fallen to his knees, Guillaumin had said that he looked like Delacroix's Tasso among the Madmen. Dr. Gachet's Guillaumin nude was unframed, and Vincent told him it was unforgivable to leave a masterpiece without a frame. Gachet promised to have one made by a local carpenter, who was slow delivering it. Shortly after receiving Theo's letter, Vincent, seeing the painting still unframed, stood dumbfounded in front of it and then began shouting at Gachet, working himself up into an irrational fury until he was screaming unintelligibly in Dutch, pacing up and down the room. Suddenly he stopped and dug his right hand deep into the pocket of his trousers. Dr. Gachet, afraid that he was armed and remembering the time when he had attacked Gauguin with a razor, managed to remain calm and stared Vincent down until he skulked out of the room. In forcing his friendship with Dr. Gachet to the breaking point, Vincent was following a familiar pattern. With Gauguin, he had formed a close friendshp, then, without warning, and without reason, had attacked him. The result of this complicated process of guilt and unrealized aggression was that he had turned the violence against himself, cutting off the ear. Gachet's reaction to Vincent's outburst was like Gauguin's: he avoided him.


Vincent's next letter to Theo was distraught and partly incoherent. "I myself am also trying to do as well as I can," he wrote, "but I will not conceal from you that I hardly dare count on being always in good health. And if my disease returns, you will forgive me." He was warning Theo that his decline had already begun. "I still love art and life very much," he went on, "but as for ever having a wife of my own, I have no great faith in that. I rather fear that toward say forty- or rather say nothing-I declare to know nothing, absolutely nothing as to what turn this may take." One wonders what prompted this sudden talk of marriage. Was Vincent thinking of Theo's family situation, or were his thoughts of marriage prompted by Dr. Gachet's daughter, Marguerite? On July 5 Theo wrote that his son was out of danger and asked Vincent to visit them on the following day, a Sunday. The atmosphere must have been tense, the baby still sick and Theo still quarreling with his employers and afraid of losing his job. Was something said about the burden of supporting Vincent? The slightest hint, a random remark expressed in a moment of impatience, would have been enough to unsettle Vincent in his already nervous and sensitized state. Whatever was said, Vincent's anxiety was evident in the first letter he wrote Theo and Jo after his final Paris visit. "I myself am far from having reached any kind of tranquility," he said. I very much fear that I too was distressed, and I think it strange that I do not in the least know under what conditions I left-if it is at 150 francs a month paid in three installments as before. Theo fixed nothing and so to begin with I left in confusion. Would there be a way of seeing each other again more calmly? ... "I have an interest in my little nephew and am anxious for his well-being: since you were good enough to call him after me, I should like him to have a soul less unquiet than mine, which is foundering." In this letter Vincent once again revealed his constant preoccupation: was Theo going to continue to support him, to send him fifty-franc notes folded into his letters? And if he was, would Vincent not be diverting resources from his infant nephew and namesake? There was no solution. At the same time, the other anchor in his life, Dr. Gachet, had abandoned him. Vincent's letter went on: "Now about Dr. Gachet. I went to see him the day before yesterday, I did not find him in....I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all, he is sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much, so that's that. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don't they both fall into the ditch?" Thus, the friend who had understood min perfectly, who had started him working again, was now a blind man who could not find his way, and who threatened to drag Vincent down with him. In response to a reassuring message from Jo that their situation had improved, both with regard to little Vincent's health and Theo's job, Vincent wrote: "Jo's letter was really like a gospel to me, a deliverance from the agony which had been caused by the hours I had shared with you, which were a bit too difficult and trying for us all. It was no slight thing when we all felt our daily bread was in danger, no slight thing when for reasons other than that we felt that our means of subsistence were fragile. "Back here, I still felt very sad and continued to feel the storm which threatens you weighing on me too. What was to be done-you see. I generally try to be fairly cheerful, but my life is also threatened at the very root, and my steps are also wavering." "I feared-not altogether but yet a little-that being a burden to you, you felt me to be rather a thing to be dreaded, but Jo's letter proves to me clearly that you understood that for my part I am as much in toil and trouble as you are....I have painted three more big canvases. They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness." Vincent, so he said, was delivered from his suffering by Jo's letter, and now he went back to work, painting more sweeping landscapes, as well as the flag covered Auvers town hall on July 14 and the funeral Crows over a Wheatfield. The last letter he sent Theo, dated July 23, avoided the subject of his emotional state and dealt with his work and practical matters like obtaining paints.

On Sunday evening, July 27, 1890, the Ravoux family, monsieur and madame and their two young daughters, sat down to dinner with all their boarders but Vincent, who was usually punctual at meals. They wondered where he was. They were taking the air outside the cafe in the warm summer evening when Vincent passed them and climbed the twisting staircase to his whitewashed garret room. Adeline Ravoux, whose portrait Vincent had once painted, Could still remember the scene in vivid detail more than sixty years later. "It was so dark only my mother noticed he was holding his side like a man in pain," she recalled in a 1953 interview for the Paris literary weekly Les Nouvelles Literaaires. "She said to my father: You'd better have a look, I don't think M. Vincent is well." Through the door of Vincent's room, M. Ravoux could hear him moan. The door was locked. When Ravoux let himself in, Vincent showed him a red stain on his shirt. "But what have you done?" M. Ravoux asked. "I've shot myself, I only hope this time I've succeeded," Vincent replied. Ravoux sent for Dr. Mazery, who came twice a week to Auvers to attend to the villagers, but he was not at home. Someone went to get Dr. Gachet, who had just returned from a day of fishing with his son on the Oise River. He arrived with his emergency medical bag and, being an advocate of electric shock treatment, his little electric coil. The Ravoux had never met Dr. Gachet before. "He did not practice in Auvers, and had never come to our house," Adeline Ravoux said in her interview. "When he arrived we had the impression that he and M. Vincent did not know one another....My father always maintained that they never exchanged the slightest word." Dr. Gachet examined Vincent's wound by candlelight. He saw that Vincent had shot himself too low and too far to the side to touch the heart. The wound, at the edge of the left side of his rib cage, formed a small, dark red circle, surrounded by a purple halo. A thin stream of blood came from it. No vital organ seemed to be affected. The bullet appeared to have stopped somewhere in Vincent's back, probably near the spinal column. Vincent, unlike a man suffering from a serious chest wound, did not seem to be in a state of shock. He was lucid and composed, sat up in bed, and asked if he could smoke, pointing to his pipe and tobacco in a pocket of his blue blouse. It was out of the question for Dr. Gachet to try to extract the bullet. He had only candlelight to operate by, and surgery of the thorax was, in any case, fairly crude. The obvious thing to do was hospitalize Vincent, if only to prevent him from doing further damage to himself. The town of Pontoise, which had a hospital, was less than six miles away. But Dr. Gachet did not do the obvious thing. After dressing the wound, he left Vincent in his airless room. Anton Hirschig, a Dutch painter who was also staying at the boarding house, visited Vincent's deathbed and reported: "It was swelteringly hot up there under the roof." Later that night, two gendarmes arrived to question Vincent. Adeline Ravoux recalled in her interview that Vincent would not answer their questions, "What I have done is nobody else's business," he said. "I am free to do what I like with my own body." The gendarmes were unable to learn where Vincent had gone to shoot himself or how he had come into possession of a gun. When Dr. Gachet had asked for Theo's current address in Paris, Vincent had refused to give it to him, but the doctor had managed to send Theo a note via an art dealer: "I am terribly sorry to trouble your rest. However, I feel it is my duty to write you immediately. I was summoned at nine o'clock at, night today Sunday by your brother Vincent. When I came to him, I found him very badly off. He had shot himself." Theo arrived in the morning of July 28, and Vincent told him: "Don't cry, I did it for the good of all of us." When he saw Vincent sitting up in bed calmly puffing on his pipe, Theo hoped he would recover. This, no more was done to save Vincent, who died in Theo's arms at one-thirty on the morning of July 29, some twenty-eight and a half hours after Dr. Gachet had been to see him, He was thirty-seven years old. Dr. Gachet did a deathbed charcoal drawing of Vincent, signed with his pseudonym, Van Ryssel. Vincent's body was placed in a coffin that had been lifted onto the Ravoux billiard table, and he was buried on July 30 in a corner of the Auvers cemetery. Dr. Gachet spoke, but his words were drowned in his own sobs. After the funeral, according to Adeline Ravoux, "M. Theo asked Dr. Gachet to take the remaining paintings. He didn't have to be asked twice, and with his son's help he rolled up canvas after canvas." Dr. Gachet had written Theo that Vincent had asked for him, which was untrue. He had been called because the first doctor, Mazery, was not at home. In any case, he did nothing to save Vincent. Although he called himself a specialist in nervous diseases, nothing in his behavior suggest that he understood that a bungled suicide is a cry for help. He left Vincent to die in his garret room, grossly underestimating the gravity of his wound and not bothering to have him hospitalized, an act of negligence that would at best be called malpractice. And, once Vincent was dead, he threw himself into the role of the grieved friend and gathered up Vincent's canvases with greedy dispatch. All in all, Dr. Gachet leaves a distasteful impression. We should not, however, accept Artaud's view of Gachet as "the direct, efficient, and sufficient cause " of Van Gogh's death. For it seems clear that we are dealing here with two unbalanced men. One was the patient, while the other, unfortunately, was the doctor. When Vincent became angry over the unframed Guillaumin, Dr. Gachet abandoned his patient. A mercurial, often thoughtless person, perhaps Gachet did not realize how grave it is for a doctor, who embodies the promise of health, to ignore the person he is supposed to be helping. If he did realize how dependent Vincent was on him, then his neglect of his patient was criminal-in the moral if not the legal sense. In any case, it is a fact that at the very moment that Vincent was taking upon himself all of Theo's problems, Dr. Gachet was divesting himself of the problem Vincent represented in his life.

The problem may have been more than that between patient and doctor, if we are to believe one of the foremost Van Gogh experts, Marc-Edo Tralbaut, who has devoted his life to the study of the painter and who personally knew Dr. Gachet's son and daughter. He suggests that Vincent had formed an attachment to Dr. Gachet's daughter and was told by the doctor that he must stop seeing Marguerite. When Vincent abruptly brought up the topic of marriage in his letter to Theo, he was thinking of Marguerite and his last chance to found a family-only to be rebuffed by her father, a man he considered his friend and helper. When I talked to M. Tralbaut, who lives in Van Gogh country, near Arles, he told me that he believed Marguerite Gachet had returned Vincent's feelings. He said he had been told by a girlhood friend of Marguerite's "that she had fallen in love with Van Gogh." All this is getting perilously close to True Confessions, and it is impossible to verify. We do know however, that Marguerite Gachet suffered serious depression after Vincent's death, that she never married, and that she lived as a recluse in Auvers, where even her own neighbors seldom saw her. And we do know that when Dr. Gachet came to Vincent's side on July 27, he was no longer a friend. The two men, according to Adeline Ravoux, did not exchange a single word. Whatever there was between them, whether it was Marguerite or simply an accumulation of mutual ill will between two unstable men, died with Vincent. Dr. Gachet would not discuss it. Vincent left Theo three things: his Auvers paintings and drawings, many of which Theo gave to Dr. Gachet: an un-mailed letter found on his person, in which Vincent said, "I tell you again that I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which will retain their calm even in the catastrophe....Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it": and his madness. Theo's mind snapped. It was as if the true nature of their pact had been that Theo assumed the financial burdens for both brothers while Vincent dealt with their demons. So interwoven were their lives that it was not only his own mental balance that Vincent was struggling to keep, it was Theo's. Theo remained on excellent terms with Dr. Gachet. They exchanged several friendly letters. It never even crossed Theo's mind that Dr. Gachet was in any way responsible for his brother's death-in fact, Theo and Johanna still considered Gachet the Van Gogh family doctor. On October 10, 1890, almost two and a half months after Vincent's death, Dr. Gachet received a letter from Johanna Van Gogh's brother: "Since yesterday, my brother-in-law Van Gogh has been in a state of overexcitement that has us seriously worried....The overexcitement is due to a quarrel with his employers, as the result of which he wants to set himself up independently without delay. The memory of his brother haunts him to such a point that he quarrels with all those who disagree with him." Two Days later, with Dr. Gachet's consent, Theo was committed to a private asylum, the Maison Dubois, at 200 Faubourg Saint-Denis. He improved and was allowed to go to Holland and see his family. But the illness had attacked his body as well as his mind, and he died in Utrecht of general paralysis on January 25, 1891, at the age of thirty-three. He was buried there, but his body was later exhumed and reburied in Auvers beside his brother's. Their remains lie under identical tombstones, as close as their psyches had been in life. Dr. Gachet continued practicing and exhibiting his canvases, signed Van Ryssel, at the Salon des Independants in Paris. He took part in a signboard contest, submitting a picture of a pig for a charcuterie. He died in 1909 at the age of eighty.

Journalist-novelist Ted Morgan was born on the same day, March 30. as Van Gogh.


The following presentation is an image of the original article as written by Ted Morgan. The above was retyped and enlarged for ease of reading.