Then Gauguin left for Paris, as fast as the trains could carry him, never to return. That other artist, Paul Gauguin-after being interviewed by the police, and insisting that his friend must have sliced off his own ear in a fit-then sent a telegram to the Dutchman’s brother, urging him to come at once. (She had passed out upon unwrapping it.) The painter, Vincent van Gogh, was known throughout the town as a crazy drunk who hung around the whorehouses too much for his own good, and who shared the squalid Yellow House with another so-called artist, even scarier than he was, though not usually as drunk and not so obviously crazy. A few hours before, the Dutchman had given his severed ear-or just its lower lobe stories differed-to a whore named Rachel in a maison de tolérance, a semilegal bordello, as a kind of early Christmas gift. On Christmas Eve, 1888, in the small Provençal town of Arles, the police found a young Dutch émigré painter in his bed, bleeding from the head, self-bandaged and semi-conscious, in a run-down residence called, for its peeling exterior, the Yellow House. It is, in its strange way, at once the Nativity fable and the Passion story of modern art.
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