and Herbert draws him out with American cigarettes and wine.
“You are interested in Van Gogh?”
“Very much.”
“Why?”
“He was a great painter.”
“So they say. I ain’t seen nary a one of his pictures.”
His bony fingers tap his empty glass. Herbert fills it.
“Well then. Van Gogh. He’s dead.”
“But you knew him?”
“Nobody knew him. He lived alone, like a dog. People were sceared of him.”
“Why?”
“He ran around the fields with them huge canvases. Boys'd throw stones at him. I didn’t. I was too small. Three or four.
“So you didn’t like him?”
“He was very funny. His hair was the color of a carrot.”
The old man laughs long, heartily, and with evident satisfaction.
“He was a very funny man. Il était drôle. His hair was like a carrot. I remember it well. You could see it from a distance.”
The cafe’s patron didn’t know Van Gogh but he remembered a family story told by his mother. One afternoon this crazy painter rushed into their vineyard shouting for them to buy a painting. They just managed to shove him outside the gate. “He wanted only fifty francs,” the patron concluded with a deep melancholy.
During his stay in Arles and nearby St Rémy, Van Gogh completed hundreds of paintings and drawings. Not one remains in the city whose citizens petitioned the authorities to place the madman in an asylum. The petition was published in the local newspaper and may be seen in the Arles Museum. The grandsons could easily excuse their grandfathers’ cruelty, but not the melancholy fact that they let a fortune slip through their fingers.
[Author's note: This story must derive from Herbert, but I no longer remember where or when I read it.]
