Nevertheless, the idiom is unusual for Van Gogh: the use of the simple past tense, the choice of words and the completeness of the sentences are very sophisticated for a 22-year-old Dutchman. Knowledge of the imperfect subjunctive in ‘pour qu’il donnât’ and ‘qu’on le laissât’ is not apparent elsewhere in the correspondence. One possibility, therefore, is that he had the French corrected by a native speaker in Paris. It is unlikely that the grammatical mistake ‘s’agravit’ (instead of ‘s’aggrava’) would occur in a publication read by Van Gogh. This mistake could have been caused by confusion with the verb ‘gravir’, which is ‘gravit’ in the third person singular of the simple past tense, but Van Gogh might also have copied the word incorrectly from an as yet undiscovered source. Granville, incidentally, is in Normandy, not Brittany.

For the texts included in the album that Theo made for Lies, see Louis van Tilborgh, ‘Notes on a donation: the poetry album for Elisabeth Huberta van Gogh’, Van Gogh Museum Journal 1995. Amsterdam 1995, pp. 86-101. Van Tilborgh does not believe that Van Gogh is the author of the story.