Vincent van Gogh. Victoria Charles

the end of 1883, van Gogh joined his parents, who had moved to Etten, near Eindhoven. The return of the prodigal son was not a success:

      I am sick at heart about the fact that, coming back after two years’ absence, the welcome home was kind and cordial in every respect, but basically there has been no change whatever, not the slightest, in what I must call the most extreme blindness and ignorance as to the insight into our mutual position.[49]

      Because his family was unable to understand him – to know him – van Gogh severed the connection.

      They have the same dread of taking me in the house as they would about taking a big rough dog. He would run into the room with wet paws – and he is so rough. He will be in everybody’s way. And he barks so loud. In short, he is a foul beast. […] And I, admitting that I am a kind of dog, leave them alone.[50]

      Van Gogh has often been criticized because of his appearance and his manners. He confesses that, in some periods of his life, he had neglected his clothes in order to ensure his solitude. He left the vicarage and rented rooms in the home of a Catholic sexton. When he visited his father’s house for a meal, he sat away from the family table: “I consciously choose the dog’s path through life; I will remain the dog, I shall be poor, I shall be a painter, I want to remain human – going into nature.”[51]

      In the summer of 1884, van Gogh met Margot Begemann, a neighbour’s daughter. The 43-year-old woman fell in love with the 31-year-old, who, as he stressed to Theo, had feelings of friendship for her and respected her “on a certain point that would have dishonoured her socially.”[52] He noticed “certain symptoms” in her behaviour, and so wrote to his brother that:

      I was afraid that she would get brain fever, and that I was sorry to state that, in my eyes, the Begemann family acted extremely imprudently in speaking to her the way they did. This had no effect, at least no other than that they told me to wait two years, which I decidedly refused to do, saying that if there was a question of marriage, it had to be soon or not at all.[53]

      At the beginning of September, Margot attempted suicide. Van Gogh rescued her by making her vomit the poison she had taken. He reported this incident “which hardly anybody here knows, or suspects, or may ever know,”[54] to Theo. Defamation and the family’s pressure were, in van Gogh’s view, the reasons behind the suicide attempt: “But for heaven’s sake, what is the meaning of that standing and of that religion which the respectable people maintain? – oh, they are perfectly absurd, making society a kind of lunatic asylum, a perfectly topsy-turvy world – oh, that mysticism.”[55] Four years later, van Gogh was to suffer his own crisis, a despair which would drive him to attempt suicide. Unlike Margot, however, he would not be rescued.