Assuming that what you say is true, that you started to write to me repeatedly but didn’t get round to finishing the letter before — I’m in the same position, since I’ve already thrown what I wrote to you into the stove twice — because I found it either too bitter or too tame. What shall I say to you? — your letter sounds very correct to me, and has a tone like that of a good Minister for Fine Arts, say.

But — that doesn’t alter the fact that it isn’t much good to me and it doesn’t satisfy me — and above all your ‘perhaps later, once you have expressed yourself more clearly, we’ll perhaps also find something in your present work — and then not act as we do now’.... fine promise — but — a ministerial fata Morgana — in the eyes of someone like me, who would rather find an outlet at a lower level provided it was in the present.

There you have it — that outlet in the present, with 3rd-rate dealers if necessary (not from choice) — is something I can’t ask of you in your position — so be it — but you can’t ask me to acquiesce in a ministerial fata Morgana, I’m too practical for that, after all. Please appreciate that I call you a good minister — and know only too well how damned bad the people1 above the ground floor are as a rule, so I’m very willing to treasure a few bright spots, even in the ministerial sphere. Which isn’t intransigent, and it’s for that reason that I herewith certainly piss on the sacred shrine of the intransigents — as I often do — on sacred shrines in general.

To business, though — have you ever realized that I presently have more than two guilders in expenses daily — reckon 1 for the model, 1 for canvas, paint — it can’t come out any cheaper.

I still have bills to pay — and — I must go to Antwerp.  1r:2

My position here is rather too strained, I’m not comfortable at the moment and I have enough trouble sticking it out and ‘possessing my soul in patience’,2 as they say.

At home, after all — although there are no real rows — they don’t find the prospect of my staying here too long a pleasant one. Which I can well understand.3 And yet I can’t leave — either altogether — or partly (partly if I keep my studio on, which is my plan) unless I make a whole lot more studies and — find something new to settle me in Antwerp. Will you please bear this in mind? And if you’d do your best to make it rather easier for me financially, I believe that then there would be a real chance of keeping the peace later, albeit it far from concord. Which I wish for myself and also for others, that calmness.

What is not can yet come, you say, regarding my work — and I, regarding the perception of something other than a fata Morgana in your saying ‘later we’ll etc. — (see above)’: Today — it’s a fata Morgana to me and I wish, in any event, to try Antwerp. Regards, with a handshake.