Marie Gachet was not a woman to make small concessions.  In whatever she did, she was beyond reproach.  She had been born and raised in Auvers-sur-Oise, the valley town beyond the hills of Paris.  Upon the hill of the town rested the church.  From its vantage point the church surveyed its hamlet of loyal patrons.  Within its stone walls lived a constant watcher; His vigilant eye forever focused, all knowing, His judgement their failings.

And that was where Marie carried herself now, up the path leading from the town to its church, her carriage heavy with Catholic guilt.  The steps on the path were deliberately raised high, the extra lift penance for those who were unworthy to make their way to this house of God.  Marie pushed the heavy wooden doors of the church open and their creak announced her presence to the empty chapel.  The air was weighted with the scent of pine and atonement.  She did not have to search; she knew where He would be.  Pulling aside the red velvet curtain with her weathered hand, she took her usual seat in confessional.

“Pardonnez-moi, Seigneur, parce que j’ai péché.”

Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned.

“It has been two days since I last confessed.”

“Continue, mon enfant.  Repent and be forgiven.”

“The man returned last night, that sinful painter.  I begged Paul to keep the door shut against him, leave him to the night where such people belong.  He brings his ideas and he possesses mon chér with them.  They are not right with the church, seigneur.  Quelle péche!  They drink the devil’s drink and laugh at sacrilege.  Paul expects me to serve Satan’s dog.  And he is my husband, mon seigneur.  But in serving him I betray mon Dieu, the highest of authorities.   And then he tells me he is to be in one of his paintings!  Je m’en fiche, it is too much.  What am I to do?”

“It is not for you whom I fear.  Non, mon enfant, l’enfer c’est pas pour toi.  It is for your husband we must pray.  It is for him we must act.   He is a good man, but without our guidance he will not be meeting you in the hereafter.”

Marie clasped her hand over her mouth as a tear streamed down her anguished face, tracing the sagging line of her chin.

“He falters with this painter, pas de consequences.“

Marie slowly nodded her head in assent, her eyes shut tightly as she rocked backwards and forwards on the hard wood of the confessional seat.  Pére Vieilli was revealed as the confessional barrier was raised, his face, usually as blank and lined as a piece of canvas, suddenly animated when faced with the threat of a heathen amongst his flock.

“Something must be done.”

*****

“Le grand fou would have me believe you are the devil incarnate, mon ami.  I was told under no uncertain terms by both him and my wife to never see you again, for the sake of my eternal soul.”

“Your eternal soul would be lucky to escape an eternity with your wife’s, my good Doctor Gachet,” was the painter’s reply.  His subject chuckled, but the doctor’s clever eyes also surveyed the room with a sudden rush of guilt that the painter had seen before, when he had painted the church on the hill and witnessed others, like Marie, on their way to an absolution.  Scoffing, the doctor leaned back onto the sofa on which he posed, rather uncomfortably, with his elbow on the table and a good part of his torso suspended between the two.  His artist friend assured him that the forced perspective employed was absolutely necessary, and not even the master painter could imagine the visual variables without this lengthy exercise.  “Be still, or you will ruin my masterpiece,” he reproached with a smile in his eye.  “I may not be a theologian comme Pére Vieilli, but it sounds as if Marie believes she is nearly as qualified to deliver such a judgement as he.”

“Néanmoins, that explains why we are now forced to paint here,” the doctor said indicating the inn’s room in which the master was now at work.  He looked away from his friend as he said this, his careless tone and look avoiding that steady gaze, well used to seeing what was hidden to others.  “I’m afraid you are persona non grata at the Gachet house, though not by the word of the master himself.”

There was a pause in the conversation.  The painter dreamed silently in watercolours and the subject dreamed lazily in the mid summer haze.  The heat seemed to have settled about the room like dust; and the very air, in the inn and filtering in from the town, discouraged too much unnecessary movement.

A bumblebee oblivious to this universal mood wandered in through the open window as the breeze would not, and circled around the portrait subject.  Paul Gachet swatted it about and in so doing shattered the established tranquillity of the afternoon.  He laughed as he missed it and sent it off course to thump into the back of the canvas.  The painter sighed and thinned his lips together in frustration.

“Oh, Vincent, it would not ruin your chef-d’oeuvre to hint at having a sense of humour.  You are too serious about your painting.  Try to enjoy some small part of life.”

Vincent seemed to consider his friend for a moment.  He raised his prominent brow, his eyebrows a defiant ginger like his hair and the beard which traced the gaunt outline of his face.   Gachet met the sad eyes he had come to know so well, that would always keep people at a distance with the respect that such subtle, visual misery commanded.

“Je suis un artist, Paul,” he responded, in a way that did not address any direct question, “I paint people and landscapes.  What I see and feel already exists, captured by my mind onto a canvas.  I can

imitate and perhaps enhance life, but if it were not already there I could not create it.  I cannot put something into being if I do not have the muse.”  There was again a stillness about the room, though this one was markedly more uncomfortable than the one before.  Gachet shifted slowly from side to side in his position, rocking about in slower intervals, constantly readjusted his arm, and made more audible noises of irritability.  The artist, frustrated himself, grew angry and threw down his brush.

“We will finish another day-”

“-My wife, she will be expecting me home.”

*****

And the painting would be finished, but its subject was never again present.  The painter’s brushstrokes were now heavy, a labour of duty and not of love.  An effort to finish and prove some small measure of his worth.  Alone in his room, above the inn’s pub, talk and laughter might rise up through the warped and ageing floorboards.  But when the artist drank, he drank alone.

Dr. Gachet was a busy man.  There is no rest for the wicked or the only doctor in a small town.  But no longer did he spend his few moments of leisure with an artist in an inn room.  Pére Vielli, like the good doctor, now made house calls.  And Marie, knitting by the fire, always had her mind on prayer and her eyes on her husband.

Months passed before communication was reduced to a meagre note accompanying a covered piece of canvas, without a frame, delivered to the house of the good doctor reading: “To my muse.  Sincerement, l’artist diable.”

*****

“Dr. Gachet, levez-vous Monsieur!  You are needed in the town.”

The messenger ripped the duvet off the portrait sitter.  Probably in reply to the look of indignation he justly received, he continued, “There has been…an incident.  At the inn.  Allez-y toute de suite!”

Gachet needed no more prompting from his bed.

With an overcoat too light for the November weather flapping around his knees, Gachet burst into the room that had served as the setting for his portrait.  Its painter lay in the bed with a stain of red sheets as his cover.  From the evidence lying crimson beneath his feet, the doctor was able to accurately gauge the situation.

“Mon Dieu mon ami,” he said running his hand over the forehead glistening with perspiration, “what have you done?”

“Le fou staggered through my whole bar in that state,” said the obviously uninterested and irritated landlady.  She had seen too many ‘incidents’ come and go through her establishment to be anything else.  “Put the other customers off their patis.  Maintenant, I will not have him getting some strange disease and infecting the whole place.  He does it without a fuss, if he dies.”

While the proprieteress had been loudly voicing her annoyance, the doctor had been assessing his patient.

“It was his own doing, it would appear.  Even with my experience, I do not think the bullet can be removed. Too near the artery.”  As he said this, the shape beneath the crimson stained sheets groaned in sheer wretchedness.  “He has probably not much more than a couple of hours.  Envoyez le garçon,” he nodded at the messenger who had woken him from his sleep, “à Pére Vieilli.  Do not elaborate on the circumstances and I will give you what it is worth in francs.”

When Vieilli swept into the room, Bible in hand, and daunting wooden cross tucked in the folds of his billowing black cloak, the doctor rose from his post beside the bed to his feet.  There was a tremor of excitement about the priest now; in presiding over matters of such seriousness he was most aware of his position of power over the realms of the living and dead.  No souls from his parish would pass peacefully into the afterlife without his permission.

“Mon chér Paul, I am not too late, am I?”  As he said this he glanced over at the occupant of the bed, and in an instant thinly veiled disapproval clouded over his face, the apparition of storm clouds visible in his brows.  “Really, I would not have expected such from you, Doctor Gachet.”

“Mon Pére,” Gachet began his entreat, “remember forgiveness and the teachings of notre Seigneur.  For this too is one of his sheep.”

The shuddering, wracking gasps of the artist was then the only sound in the room.  The priest considered him a moment.  Without another word to the doctor, and still with thin-lipped disapproval, the priest bent over the man lying near death and performed the last rights.  Only Gachet and the messenger boy would be witnesses to these final moments of the painter’s life, and later the same party would be the only ones to attend the funeral. As Pére Vieilli chanted the last of the Latin hymns, the winds of an autumn night, death transcendent in the very season, curled around and swept off the soul of l’artist diable.

Published in A Caledon Collection (Giant Beaver Publications: 2009)

http://www.amazon.com/Caledon-Collection-Raisa-Austina-Palha/dp/09738221