“That reminds me of a dinner I gave a few years ago,” said Gauguin. “One of the men I invited said, ‘You understand, my friend, that I can’t take my wife to these dinners of yours when your mistress is present.’ ‘Very well,’ I replied, ‘I’ll send her out for the evening.’ When the dinner was over and they all went home, our honest Madame, who had yawned the whole evening, stopped yawning and said to her husband, ‘Let’s have some nice piggy talk before we do it.’ And her husband said, ‘Let’s not do anything but talk. I have eaten too much this evening.’”

“That tells the whole story!” shouted Zola, above the laughter.

“Put aside the ethics for a moment and get back to immorality in art,” said Vincent. “No one ever calls my pictures obscene, But I am invariably accused of an even greater immorality, ugliness.”

“You hit it that time, Vincent,” said Toulouse-Lautrec.

“Yes, that’s the essence of the new immorality for the public,” agreed Gauguin. “Did you see what the Mercure de France called us this month? The cult of ugliness.”

“The same criticism is levied against me,” said Zola. “A countess said to me the other day, ‘My dear Monsieur Zola, why does a man of your extraordinary talent go about turning up stones just to see what sort of filthy insects are crawling underneath them?’”

Lautrec took an old newspaper clipping out of his pocket.

“Listen to what the critic said about my canvases at the last Salon des Independents. ‘Toulouse-Lautrec may be reproached for taking delight in representing trivial gaiety, coarse amusements and “low subjects”. He appears to be insensible to beauty of feature, elegance of form and grace of movement. It is true that he paints with a loving brush beings ill-formed, stumpy and repulsive in their ugliness, but of what good is such perversion?’”

“Shades of Frans Hals,” murmured Vincent.

“Well, he’s right,” said Seurat. “If you men are not perverted, you’re at least misguided. Art has to do with abstract things, like colour, design, and tone. It should not be used to improve social conditions or search for ugliness. Painting should be like music, divorced from the everyday world.”

“Victor Hugo died last year,” said Zola, “and with him a whole civilization died. A civilization of pretty gestures, romance, artful lies and subtle evasions, my books stand for the new civilization; the unmoral civilization of the twentieth century. So do your paintings. Bouguereau is still dragging his carcass around Paris, but he took ill the day that Edouard Manet exhibited Picnic on the Grass, and he died the day Mane finished Olympia. Well, Manet is gone now, and so is Daumier, but we still have Degas, Lautrec and Gauguin to carry on their work.”

“Put the name of Vincent Van Gogh on that list,” said Toulouse-Lautrec.

“Put it at the head of the list,” said Rousseau.

“Very well, Vincent,” said Zola with a smile, “you have been nominated for the cult of ugliness. Do you accept the nomination?”

“Alas,” said Vincent, “I’m afraid I was born into it.”

“Let’s formulate our manifesto, gentlemen,” said Zola. “First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain good, because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex beautiful, even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness, and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety, without making moral judgements. We think the prostitute as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature, and are woven into the design of life!”

“Glasses up, gentlemen,” cried Toulouse-Lautrec. “We drink to amorality and the cult of ugliness. May it beautify and recreate the world.”

“Tosh!” said Cezanne.

“And ‘Tosh!’ again,” said Georges Seurat.

9

AT THE BEGINNING of June, Theo and Vincent moved to their new apartment at 54, Rue Lepic, Montmartre. The house was just a short way from the Rue Laval; they had only to go up the Rue Montmartre a few blocks to the Boulevard Clichy, and then take the winding Rue Lepic up past the Moulin de la Galette, almost into the countrified part of the Butte.

Their apartment was on the third floor. It had three rooms, a cabinet and a kitchen. The living room was comfortable with Theo’s beautiful old cabinet, Louis Philippes, and a big stove to protect them against the Paris cold. Theo had a talent for home-making. He loved to have everything just right. His bedroom was next to the living room. Vincent slept in the cabinet, behind which was his studio, an ordinary sized room with one window.