1. Vincent had promised to send Theo Les champs et la mer by Jules Breton (see letter 60). The poem ‘Illusions’, dedicated to Anatole France and dated ‘Courrières, 1873’, reads:

‘How rashly leaps the wounded heart,

When in the grip of winter’s heavy shroud,

To that first refuge where, young and at peace,

It heard itself amid the silence sing.

How bitter the delight, my soul, with which you revel in

Your childhood home, the fields and flowers round the lake’s

Inlet, where on the reeds the bird sways back and forth;

And yet, Chimaera, you deceived us then!

For in your fair mirage a splendid future time

Like a glorious summer unfurled its ripened sheaf

Whose drifting ears of corn were veritable suns.

You lied.– And yet how irresistible their charms,

Those phantoms that we see in crimson distances,

Through our tears’ great prism shimmering!’

(Qu’impétueusement un coeur blessé s’élance,

Lorsque l’hiver l’étreint sous son linceul épais,

Vers le premier asile où, jeune et dans la paix,

Il s’écoutait chanter au milieu du silence.

Avec quelle âpre ardeur, âme, tu te repais

Du toit natal, des prés et des fleurs bordant l’anse

De l’étang où l’oiseau sur les joncs se balance;

Et pourtant, ô Chimère, alors tu nous trompais!

Car dans ton beau mirage un avenir superbe,

Comme un été splendide ouvrait sa riche gerbe

Dont les épis flottants étaitent de vrais soleils.

Tu mentais.– Mais qu’ils ont d’irrésistibles charmes

Ces fantômes qu’on voit dans les lointains vermeils

S’iriser à travers le grand prisme des larmes!)

See Breton 1875, pp. 75-76.

2. Rom. 8:28.

3. Emile Adélard Breton, Sunday morning in winter (present whereabouts unknown); the painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1873 (no. 180). Eugène Louis Pirodon and P. de Comte (?) made a print of it, which appeared in L’Illustration 61 (10 May 1873), p. 320. This print, Un dimanche matin en hiver, is to be found in Van Gogh’s estate (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, t*637). Ill. 1762 . A reproduction of it also appeared in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts 15 (1873), 2nd series, vol. 8, p. 51.