1. This was letter 762.

a. Read: ‘lives’.

2. Theo had sent a letter of recommendation to Dr Peyron with letter 762. See Documentation, 24 April 1889. Peyron replied on 29 April (FR b1059).

3. Vincent would bring up this idea – to join the Foreign Legion – several more times, but when Theo emphatically dismissed the plan in letter 766, the subject was dropped for good.

4. In Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, Jesus is portrayed as a good-natured and somewhat fanatical idealist, whose doctrine of charity is shattered by reality. With regard to this book, see also letter 30, n 4.

5. Van Gogh draws a parallel between the churches and the Duval restaurants, because the latter were popular and fashionable, and catered for the masses. Regarding Duval restaurants, see letter 502, n. 8.

6. Ernest Renan’s L’Antéchrist (1873), the fourth part of his Histoire des origines du christianisme, covers the period from the arrival of Saint Paul in Rome to the end of the Jewish Revolution (61-73). Renan describes the persecution of Christians in Rome, the struggle between Paul and the Emperor Nero (the ‘Antichrist’) and the destruction of Jerusalem.

7. Lesbos is a reference to Puvis de Chavannes’s painting Pleasant land ; see letter 683, n. 19.

8. Van Gogh had also written in the preceding letter that he was absent-minded and could not think clearly (letter 761).

9. In mentioning his own involvement, Van Gogh is referring to his abnormal behaviour, which had caused so much commotion among the residents of his neighbourhood, resulting in the petition for his confinement in hospital (letter 750).

10. The inhabitants of Provence were known for their superstitious nature. It was a widespread practice, for example, to predict the future by means of Tarot cards.