The Last Van Gogh Read Online Free

Father also seemed to be affected by Madame Chevalier’s arrival. His transformation was apparent almost immediately after she arrived. He traveled to Paris less frequently, spent more time at the house, and began inviting his artist friends over from Paris to paint with him in the garden.
    He even took the opportunity, after Mother’s death, to redecorate part of the house. Opting to rebel against what he considered Mother’s haute-bourgeois taste, a quality he deemed to be wholly nonintellectual, he placed among her antiques odd mementos he collected from his artist friends. Formal perfection was replaced by eccentricity. An empty bamboo birdcage hung in one corner of his sitting room. A stringless violin was pegged to the plasterboard wall. He lined the glass-covered doors of his étagère with prints and etchings he liked but felt were not technically strong enough to be framed.
    He replaced the muted tones my mother had chosen for the walls in both his master bedroom and the room where Madame Chevalier slept with vibrant colors and intricately patterned wallpapers. He painted one of the doors near the staircase bright red with large black Chinese letters down the side and covered the hallways with a wallpaper full of reclining Roman nudes.
    Still, he maintained the dark taupe and pale green walls in the formal rooms on the ground floor and kept the heavy dark furniture that Mother had brought from Paris. So, on the outside, and to those who visited after Mother died, our home maintained the same somber quality. In the narrow floors upstairs, however, the change was remarkable.
    At first, I liked the bright turquoise and scarlet palette Father had selected for his and Madame Chevalier’s rooms, separated from each other by a floor. But as I grew older, my opinion changed. I began to see them as vulgar—even garish—and I avoided entering them because they bothered me so. Even the nude illustrations on the hall wallpaper began to embarrass me.
    I learned to retreat to either the sanctuary of our rear garden or the comfort of my own small room. It was the tiniest and most modest one in the house, but I preferred it. I enjoyed the fact that the room was set back so my walls did not buttress Madame Chevalier’s. It was the one thing in the house that was mine completely. The little decoration my room did have came from a few old pieces that had been my mother’s, including a rosewood nightstand and bureau and a few china figurines.
    My favorite was a young girl in a brightly colored gown. The stiff porcelain skirt was painted with small scarlet dots, the nipped waist in pale blue. Her delicate white hands extended outward, as though she were permanently accepting an invitation to dance, and I would stare at her as I drifted off to sleep, her black eyes and ruby mouth smiling at me as I dreamed of late-night Parisian soirees and a trail of names filling my dance card.

THREE
     

A Delightful Young Woman
     
    A LTHOUGH Father told us that Madame Chevalier would be our governess, it was clear almost from the start that she had little training as a teacher. She brought with her no readers, no pencils, only a few samplers for me to do in needlepoint.
    What would begin as a lesson after breakfast always ended with her holding my brother on her lap and me copying the letters of the alphabet on a few sheets of paper that she had torn from my father’s sketch pad.
    After both my brother and I learned to read, she had little else to offer us. She would sometimes bring down two books from my father’s library and have us spend the afternoon reading them. “Your father says if you read, you’ll be able to answer all your questions regarding the world,” she told us. But strangely, I never saw her bury her head in any of their pages. She preferred to sit by the fire, looking at the sewing patterns she had ordered in the mail.
    What she lacked in intellectual enthusiasm, she made up in attending to our father. There was little