Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (26 page)

Some day or other, I believe I will find a way to have my own exhibition in a café
.

—V
INCENT VAN
G
OGH
to his brother Theo, June 10, 1890

he commuter train from Paris’s Gare du Nord took about an hour and a quarter to cover the twenty miles to Auvers-sur-Oise via a bedroom community called Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. “That’s a quarter of an hour more than it took Vincent back in 1890,” scoffed the man at the café facing Auvers’s vintage train station. He sipped his coffee and spread his arms. “When Vincent came out here from Montmartre the train was direct and we were in the countryside—farms, the Oise River, thatched houses, it was beautiful, beautiful …”

Traffic on the road outside was heavy. Suburban housing projects hedged in the south side of town. Auvers is now part of Greater Paris, a city Vincent van Gogh hated and loved in equal measure, as do many of its residents.

Two essential things emerged from what this loquacious local had told me. First, he called Van Gogh “Vincent,” as if he knew him. Second, he was obviously suffering from acute nostalgia for a period he couldn’t possibly have known. I judged him to be around fifty years old. Van Gogh came to Auvers on May 21, 1890. He died here at the Auberge Ravoux, at the time a cheap lodging house, seventy days later, on July 29, having shot himself in the chest during a fit of the intermittent insanity that came over him throughout his tumultuous thirty-seven-year life. It might have been a form of epilepsy or possibly porphyria, a hereditary nervous disorder. Theo van Gogh is thought to have succumbed to it, too: he died six months after his brother, aged thirty-four.

Vincent and Theo van Gogh were buried in Auvers’s otherwise unremarkable cemetery. Since then the village’s fame has increased manyfold. It draws about half a million Van Gogh pilgrims yearly. After living in the capital for decades I thought it high time I join them. Most beeline to the graveyard, the Auberge Ravoux and the locales Van Gogh painted. I decided to do the same.

Boosters call Auvers the “cradle of Impressionism.” Before Van Gogh arrived, painters the likes of Pissarro, Guillaumin, Monet, Daubigny (of the Barbizon school), and Cézanne lived or worked here from the mid-1800s onward. Vincent remains the star of the show, however, because of his tragic end and the notoriety (and astronomical prices for his paintings) that followed.

Having finished our coffees and said good-bye to the chatty man in the café facing the train station, Alison and I marched a few hundred yards north to the village church. It’s easy to spot.

Notre-Dame-d’Auvers started life at about the time the Normans conquered England, that is, in 1066 (and all that). But the Romanesque tower and buttressed backside that Vincent loved were built in 1170. Or so said the friendly woman volunteer at the table inside the church. She was eager to show us around, though there wasn’t much to see. Apparently we were the only visitors so far on this winter weekday, early in the morning. The cold, musty, echoing sanctuary instilled in us poignant thoughts propitious for Van Gogh–hunting.

It was Alison who noticed the panel outside the church, flanking the road to the cemetery. The panel showed a full-color reproduction of Van Gogh’s painting
L’Église d’Auvers
. As we stood bemused before it, a group of tourists trudged up the hill from their bus and paused. Several framed the panel and the church on the screens of their digital cameras.
Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz
went the cameras. There was a good deal of jostling. Everyone gave suggestions on how to reproduce the mad genius’s framing while also including the panel.

A raw-boned white horse roamed freely in a field between the church and the cemetery, which sits on an elevated plateau. This part of Auvers hasn’t been developed and looks pretty much the way it did in 1890, to judge from period photographs. The horse led us toward another panel. It showed Van Gogh’s summertime painting of a wheat field with crows and curling unpaved roads. The crows and muddy roads were still there.
Caw, caw, caw
croaked the crows as we tramped in the icy mud.

In Vincent’s day, the view from up here reportedly took in the Oise River, endless farmland, and thatched houses (though they were disappearing already in 1890, noted the artist). Now you can’t help noticing the inevitable spread of apartment buildings, small industry, and commerce.

Somehow we managed to miss the maps indicating the whereabouts in the cemetery of the Van Gogh brothers’ tomb. A smiling local showed us to it. He turned out to be the gravedigger and was disarmingly friendly, like the woman in the church and the man in the café by the station. Chilly Paris, rising just across the fields, seemed distant.

We hurried over to have a look at the grave before the busload of fellow visitors arrived. To me it evoked old-fashioned twin beds, except that here the headboards were lichen-frosted stone knotted with ivy. The gravedigger removed a few decomposed offerings left by Vincent’s admirers, said farewell to us, and disappeared.

I couldn’t help feeling queasy. Here we were, two unwitting pilgrims sighing and looking forlorn, already calling Van Gogh by his first name. Vincent.

We failed to find the resting place of Dr. Gachet (the art collector–doctor who ministered to Van Gogh is in fact buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris). We could not find a single historic personage whose name we recognized, and soon squelched back across the plateau to the wheat-field panel. On it was a quote from one of Vincent’s many letters to Theo: “Immense expanses of wheat under troubled skies, and I don’t mind trying to convey the sadness, the extreme solitude …”

Apparently it was a few hundred yards from this spot, behind the Auvers château, that Vincent shot himself. I couldn’t help wondering how many visitors to Auvers overlook the fact that something about this place drove the mad Dutchman to commit suicide.

The muddy road led us from the plateau down to the edge of another part of town. Long and narrow, Auvers straggles along for about three miles, wrapping around the plateau. Soon we stumbled upon the workshop of landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny (1817–78). Stumbled? Well, not really: there were several signs pointing to it. In fact there are signs on just about every street corner in Auvers pointing to one attraction or another. You can’t get lost for long.

Daubigny was an illustrious member of the Barbizon school of painters who worked primarily around Fontainebleau. Nonetheless he spent much of his life in and near Auvers. Thirty years before Van Gogh arrived, Daubigny was here to welcome the aged master Camille Corot, sometimes called a “pre-Impressionist,” and the young Claude Monet.

Although Daubigny’s atelier wasn’t supposed to be open in winter we weren’t aware of that and boorishly rang the bell. Instead of snarling, the owner smiled winningly and let us in. He turned out to be Daubigny’s great-great-grandson. A small, soft-spoken man in his sixties or seventies, Daniel Raskin Daubigny sported worn leather slippers and a woodsman’s shirt open at the collar. His wife shook our hands then returned to the kitchen where she was cooking something that smelled delicious.

Delicious
was the word that kept dancing in my mind as Monsieur Raskin Daubigny showed us from room to room. It was a humble family house and workshop, built in 1861 and decorated by Corot, Daumier, Oudinot, Daubigny
père
, and his son Charles (alias Karl). The plank floors creaked. The heady smells of beeswax, dust and age-blotched paper mixed with those of Madame’s slow-simmering stew. Wintry light slanted in through high windows. On the walls hung lovely landscapes and seascapes and light, joyful representations of bundled wheat, roosters, and the four seasons.

As we shuffled along, Monsieur Raskin Daubigny told us how he’d spent years and a small fortune restoring the place then decided to open it to the public in 1990. The convoluted tale of the inheritance and the travails of his relatives seemed straight out of Balzac or Zola. To top it all, once he’d fixed the atelier and thrown open its doors, the French tax inspectors tripled his taxes, or so he claimed with disgust. But he was a cheerful man nonetheless and proud of his heritage.

“Oh yes, this was my room, too,” he announced, showing us the children’s room, called “
la Chambre de Cécile.
” “I was terribly afraid of the big bad wolf,” he added. In 1863 Daubigny, his daughter Cécile, and son Charles had painted the walls with fanciful scenes from the tales and fables of Perrault, Grimm, and La Fontaine. Little Red Riding Hood was there, and the wolf. I, too, would’ve been afraid of him, staring out at my crib, licking his chops.

The best was yet to come. The atelier, furnished like a living room, has a cathedral ceiling and a wall of windows. Enormous landscape canvases showing Italy’s lake district, herons, and French country scenes cover the other three walls. “Corot conceived them,” said our host. “Daubigny father and son painted them, with Oudinot. Some parts may have been done by Corot himself …”

Whoever painted them, after more than a century they remain perfect for the site, a true, unself-conscious work of installation art. We stared at the landscapes long and rapturously as Monsieur Raskin Daubigny told us in fascinating detail about his great-great-grandfather’s friendship with Corot and Monet. And about how an unscrupulous art dealer tried in the 1980s to buy the whole house and atelier from him planning to dismantle and ship it to America. “I don’t care about money,” he said, eyes twinkling. “I care about this.” Happily the atelier is a registered landmark and no one can touch it.

By the time we’d studied the clutter of Daubigny souvenirs in a glass case (medals from painting salons, a daguerreotype, plaster casts) and stepped into the garden, it was nearly lunchtime. Monsieur and Madame showed us a last oddity: the floating painting workshop that Monet used. It was a small riverboat with a studio-cabin for painting, cooking, and sleeping. “Actually this is a replica Monet built of the boat my great-great-grandfather used when he drifted down the Oise to the Seine, painting as he went, all the way to Normandy and the sea …”

It was this delicious image that accompanied us as we followed the signs back to Auvers’s church and a lunch spot recommended by Monsieur Raskin Daubigny. Though the interior was studiously twee, it was a good choice: the ham and cheese omelets were the size of Frisbees, and the homemade pear-and-chocolate pie alone was worth the trip from Paris to Auvers. Visitors like us talked in hushed voices of “poor, sad Vincent.” A table of locals, instead, noisily applauded a freshly coiffed white poodle that yapped and sneezed on command. “Is he called Vincent?” I asked. “Vincent? No, his name is Event,” answered his owner. “Because he was such an important event in my life …”

The official Daubigny Museum—not the atelier—and the Museum of Absinthe were both closed. But the inevitable signs pointed to Dr. Gachet’s house. We recognized it immediately from the full-color panel near the front gate showing Van Gogh’s
Portrait du Docteur Gachet
. A soulful little man with a crinkly white hat and blue coat, Gachet clutched in his hand a spray of foxglove, also known as medicinal digitalis.

Some of the same trees Van Gogh shows in another Auvers picture,
Dans le Jardin du Docteur Gachet
, appeared to be still alive well over a century after he painted them. The tall white house (also painted by Cézanne, another of Gachet’s artist friends) once held many priceless paintings. Closed for decades, to locals it became a haunted house whose reopening as a “Place of Memory” only partly dissipated the ghoulish feel. The red window frames are no longer peeling as they once were, and the green shutters that flapped in the wind like the gills of a dying fish have been restored. The Maison du Dr. Gachet is ostensibly a house-museum, but as I wandered around its echoing, somber rooms I felt a chill. There isn’t a lot to see—some vintage photos, a reproduction of Vincent’s only eau-forte etching showing Dr. Gachet. I have never been fond of shrines, especially when they’re associated with commercial enterprises, and a commercial shrine is precisely what the house seemed to be. It’s managed by the same people who own the Auberge Ravoux, the hallowed place where Vincent drew his last breath.

At Auvers’s seventeenth- to eighteenth-century château we discovered one of the town’s most popular family attractions, a multimedia extravaganza called “Voyage to the Time of the Impressionists.” We hesitated. It sounded like high kitsch. But the weather was foul and we soon tired of sloshing around in the château’s muddy grounds, unable because of the rain to see from the panoramic terrace.

Inside the château we were issued with outsized headphones and pointed at the first room, the Portrait Gallery. There were the usual suspects: Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Sisley, Boudin, and the sole woman Impressionist, Berthe Morisot.

Suddenly we were whisked by voices and images into the dark, dank Paris of the 1860s, among the riffraff of Rue de la Tuerie (“Slaughter Street”) and other charming addresses wiped out by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in his colossal Second Empire remake of the city. Period photos showed Haussmann’s destruction of medieval Paris—about twenty-five thousand buildings razed—and the birth of the modern capital the Impressionists painted.