Many thanks for your letter and the 50-franc note which it contained. It isn't cheery news that the pains in your leg have come back—-Good Lord—-you ought to be able to live in the South too, because I always think that what we need is sun and fine weather and a blue sky as the most efficacious cure. The weather here remains fine, and if it was always like this, it would be better than the painters' paradise, it would be absolute Japan. I keep thinking of you and Gauguin and Bernard all the time wherever I go. It is so beautiful, and I so wish you were here.

Enclosed a little sketch of a square size 30 canvas, the starry sky actually painted at night under a gas jet. The sky is greenish-blue, the water royal blue, the ground mauve. The town is blue and violet, the gas is yellow and the reflections are russet-gold down to greenish-bronze. On the blue-green expanse of sky the Great Bear sparkles green and pink, its discreet pallor contrasts with the harsh gold of the gas.

Two colorful little figures of lovers in the foreground.

Also a sketch of a size 30 canvas representing the house and its surroundings in sulphur-colored sunshine, under a sky of pure cobalt. The subject is frightfully difficult; but that is just why I want to conquer it. It's terrific, these houses, yellow in the sun, and the incomparable freshness of the blue. And everywhere the ground is yellow too. I shall send you a better drawing than this rough improvised sketch out of my head later on.

The house on the left is pink with green shutters, I mean the one in the shadow of the tree. That is the restaurant where I go for dinner every day. My friend the postman lives at the end of the street on the left, between the two railway bridges. The night cafe I painted is not in the picture, it is to the left of the restaurant.

Milliet thinks this horrible, but I need not tell you that when he says he cannot understand anyone amusing himself doing such a dull grocer's shop, and such stark, stiff houses with no grace whatever, remember that Zola did a certain boulevard at the beginning of L'Assommoir and Flaubert a corner of the Quai de la Villette in the midst of the dog days at the beginning of Bouvard et Pécuchet and neither of them is moldy yet.

And it does me good to do difficult things. That does not prevent me from having a terrible need of-—shall I say the word?-—of religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars, and I am always dreaming of a picture like this with a group of living figures of our comrades.

I had a letter from Gauguin, who seems very unhappy and says that as soon as he has sold something, he will certainly come, but he still does not make it clear whether he would agree to shake himself free and come if he had his fare paid.

He says that the people where he is staying are and have been wonderful to him, and that to leave them like that would be an outrage. But that I would be twisting the knife in his heart if I thought that he would not come straight off if he could. And he says too that if you could sell his pictures at a low price, he would be quite content. I shall send you his letter with my reply.

Certainly his coming would increase the importance of this attempt to paint in the South by 100 per cent. And once here, I can't see him going away again because I think he will take root. And I keep telling myself that in the end what you are doing privately will be a far bigger thing with his collaboration than with my work alone. You will have more satisfaction out of it and no increase in expenses. Later on, if someday perhaps you are on your own with impressionist pictures, you will only have to continue and encourage an already existing, concern. Gauguin also says that Laval has found someone who will give him 150 francs a month for at least a year, and that Laval also may come in February. And as I wrote to Bernard that I thought he could not live in the South for less than 3.50 or 4 francs a day for board and lodging alone, he says that he thinks that on 200 francs a month there would be board and lodging for all three, and that is not impossible if we eat and sleep at the studio.

That Benedictine Father must have been very interesting. What would the religion of the future be according to him? He will probably say, Always the same as that of the past. Victor Hugo says, God is an eclipsing lighthouse and in that case we are certainly passing through that eclipse now.

I only wish that they would succeed in proving to us something that would tranquiilize and comfort us so that we might stop feeling guilty and wretched, and could go on just as we are without losing ourselves in solitude and nothingness, and not have to stop at every step in a panic, or calculate nervously the harm we may unintentionally be doing to other people. That queer fellow Giotto, whose biographer says that he was always in pain and always full of ardor and ideas, there, that's what I should like to achieve, such a self-confidence that makes you happy and gay and alive in all conditions. That would come true more easily in the country or in a small town than in the furnace of Paris.

I should not be surprised if you liked the "Starry Night" and the "Plowed Fields," there is a greater quiet about them than in the other canvases. If the work always went on like that, I should be less worried about money, for it would be easier for people to take to them, if the technique kept on growing more harmonious. But this blasted mistral makes it very hard to get one's brushwork firm and interwoven with feeling, like a piece of music played with emotion. In this still weather I let myself go and don't have to struggle so much against impossibilities.

Tanguy's parcel has arrived, and I thank you very, very much for it, because I now hope to be able to do something for the next exhibition during the autumn. What is most urgent now is 5 or even 10 meters of canvas. I am writing to you again and I shall send Gauguin's letter with my reply.

It is very interesting, what you say of Maurin. Certainly his drawings are not expensive at 40 francs. More and more I come to think that the true and right way in the picture trade is to follow one's taste, what one has learned from the masters, in short, one's faith. It is no easier, I am convinced, to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl: it means taking trouble, and you risk your life for it as a dealer or as an artist. Then once you have some good stones, you must never doubt yourself again, but boldly fix your price and stick to it. Meanwhile, however . . . but still this thought encourages me to work, even while I naturally still suffer at having to spend money. But this idea of the pearl came to me in the midst of my suffering, and I should not be surprised if it did you good, too, during periods of discouragement. There are as few good pictures as good diamonds.

I wanted to do some more sunflowers too, but they were already gone. Yes, during autumn I very much want to be able to do a dozen square size 30 canvases, and as far as I can see, I may very well manage to do it. I have a terrible lucidity at moments, these days when nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself any more, and the picture comes to me as in a dream. I am rather afraid that this will mean a reaction and depression when the bad weather comes, but I will try to avoid it by studying this business of drawing figures from memory.

I am always finding my best powers frustrated by the lack of models, but I do not worry, I do landscape and color without fussing about where it will lead me. I know this, that if I went and begged the models—-Now do pose for me, I beseech you-—I should be behaving like Zola's good painter in L'OEuvre Certainly Manet did nothing like that. And Zola does not say in his book how the people who saw nothing supernatural in the painting behaved.

But we must not criticize Zola's book. I will send you five of Bernard's drawings in the same style as the others.

I wrote to him that, as Gauguin had not stated definitely whether he would or would not come, I could not offer him free hospitality, nor even hospitality to be paid for in pictures and drawings. And that his food and lodging here would in any case cost him a little more than where he is now. Unless, indeed, we should save something by having meals at the studio, with or without Gauguin.

But that in any case I did not insist upon his coming. But as I counted on spending the winter here, his company would be very welcome to me, but first of all he must make his calculations.

If Gauguin writes to you definitely one of these days, either to you or to me, we can see again about Bernard. I think that Bernard would find what he wants here, but his father would really have to be a little more generous toward him. Because Bernard is painstaking. I do not like these drawings, though, as well as the earlier ones.

At the beginning of next month there will again be heaps of things coming down on me all at once, with the frames and the stretchers that I am having made here for the decoration of the house at the same time as the month's rent and the charwoman.

But I can put off taking the frames and stretchers, and in any case I feel sure I shall manage somehow.

The one thing I do hope is that by working hard I shall have enough pictures at the end of a year to have a show if I want to, or, if you wish it, at the time of the exhibition. I am not set on it myself, but what I am set on is showing you something that is not wholly bad.

I need not exhibit, but we would have work of mine that would prove that I am neither a slacker nor a good-for-nothing and I should be content. But the main thing is, I think, that I must not take less trouble than the painters who are working expressly for it.

Whether one exhibits or doesn't exhibit, one must produce, and after that one has the right to smoke one's pipe in peace.

But this year we will produce, and I am struggling to make the new series better than the first two lots.

And among the studies there will be some, I hope, which might be pictures. As for the "Starry Sky," I'd still like very much to paint it, and perhaps one of these nights I shall be in the same plowed field if the sky is sparkling.

Tolstoi's book My Religion was published in French as early as 1885, but I have never seen it in any catalogue.

He does not seem to believe much in the resurrection of either the body or the soul. Above all he seems not to believe much in heaven—-he reasons so like a nihilist-—but-—and here he rather parts company with them-—he attaches great importance to doing what you are doing well, since it is probably all you have.

But if he does not believe in resurrection, he seems to believe in the equivalent-—the continuance of life—-the progress of humanity—-the man and his work almost infallibly continued by humanity in the next generation, so the solution he gives should not be ephemeral. Himself a nobleman, he turned laborer, he can make boots, mend frying pans, guide the plow, and dig the earth.

I can do none of that, but I can respect a human soul vigorous enough to mold itself anew. Good God! we must not complain of living in an age of nothing but slackers when we are contemporaries of such specimens of poor mortals as this, and even with no great faith in heaven itself at that. He believes-—perhaps I have already told you—-in a peaceful revolution, caused by the need of love and religion which must appear among men as a reaction to skepticism, and to that desperate suffering that makes one despair.

Good-by for now. Your last letter was dated Friday. It would be rare good luck if I got your next one as early as Wednesday. But there is no hurry and it will be all right whatever happens.

With a handshake,

Ever yours,