3. Taken from the essay ‘Eugène Delacroix’, in Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants français et étrangers: ‘I feel happy no longer to be happy as I understood it in the past’ (Je me sens heureux de ne plus être heureux comme je l’entendais autrefois) (see Silvestre, Histoire, pp. 41-84 (quotation on p. 43)).

b. Means: ‘zeker’ (certainly, safely).

4. See for the preface to Chérie: letter 559, n. 3.

5. Van Gogh may have learned that Daudet was often with Turgenev in his last days from the article that he mentions in letter 565: Alphonse Daudet, ‘Mémoires d’un homme de lettres. Tourguéneff’, Le Temps (10 November 1883); published in an English translation as ‘Tourguéneff in Paris. Reminiscences by Daudet’, Century Magazine 27 (November 1883), pp. 48-53. Theo must have written to Vincent about this article or sent it to him. In it, Daudet stresses Turgenev’s gentle character and his love of nature, and he describes their conversations: ‘When we were done with the books and issues of the day, the conversation widened and we came back to ever-present arguments, ideas and talked of love and death’ (Quand on en avait fini avec les livres et les préoccupations du jour, la conversation s’élargissait, on revenait au thèses, aux idées toujours présentes, on parlait de l’amour et de la mort).

c. Means: ‘zoals’ (as, like).

7. See for this quotation from Silvestre’s Eugène Delacroix: letter 526, n. 2. The end of the sentence is ungrammatical because Van Gogh incorporated these words of Silvestre’s literally.

8. The closing lines of the comedy Socrate et sa femme (Paris 1885) by Théodore Faullain de Banville. See ed. Paris 1886, p. 39. These lines, spoken by Xanthippe (‘Tout ... d’elle’) and Socrates (‘Adorez-là ... mieux’), also appear in Van Gogh’s Antwerp sketchbook. See Van der Wolk 1987, p. 95. There is a good chance that Van Gogh read this passage in a periodical or newspaper. The final two lines, for example, were quoted in a review in L’Art moderne. Revue critique des arts et de la littérature 6 (7 February 1886), p. 43. Theo knew what Vincent was talking about. He and Andries Bonger had seen a performance of Socrate et sa femme at the Théâtre Français on 25 December 1885 (FR b1832).

9. James Abbot McNeil Whistler, Arrangement in grey and black, no. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 1872-1873 (Glasgow, Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery & Museum Kelvingrove). Ill. 1424

. Van Gogh may have seen this painting when he was in England since it was on show in an exhibition in Pall Mall, London, in 1874. See A. McLaren Young et al., The paintings of James McNeill Whistler. 2 vols. New Haven and London 1980, vol. 1, pp. 82-84, cat. no. 137. By the second reference Van Gogh may mean Legros’s Carlyle in his study or one of the other portraits of Carlyle by Legros that have survived, cf. letter 358, n. 2.

10. After the death of his wife in 1866 (their marriage was childless) Carlyle led a lonely and reclusive existence. He seldom left his house and published very little after this time. See Heffer 1995.

11. In ‘Paul Baudry’ in Le Temps (26 January 1886), an appreciation written on the occasion of Baudry’s death on 17 January, Paul Mantz wrote: ‘Baudry had been created to work on the renewal of the smile, and he did his duty delightfully’ (Baudry avait été créé pour travailler au renouvellement du sourire, et il a délicieusement fait son devoir). Theo must have drawn Vincent’s attention to this article or sent it to him.