Van Gogh [antikvár]

It was the madness of Van Gogh, as it is the folly of lovers, to be caught up in a fiery, passionate, relentless attempt to discover a self that ever invites yet always resists possession— folly perhaps, but, once tasted, a transcending obsession. " What each man is exactly no one will ever be able to tell," wrote Léon Bloy. "There are those who bow beneath their own soul as if it were too great for them to bear— there are countless numbers who live in forget-fulness of its very existence." The last few weeks of Van Gogh's despairing pursuit were to be lived out at Auvers-sur-Oise. He himself seemed to feel"that the cause was lost. "There are circumstances," he said, " in which it is better to be the vanquished than the victor, better Prometheus than Jupiter." Anxious to have his brother near at hand, in more normal surroundings than those of the hospital at Saint-Rémy, yet aware that the noise and excitement of life in Paris itself were obviously out of the question, Theo had at first asked Pissarro to take Vincent to his home at Éragny. It was Pissarro who, when Vincent van Gogh had arrived in Paris in i886, had ini-