1. The letter from Gauguin to Vincent has not survived; he had also written to tell Theo that he would travel to Arles at the end of the month. He informed Schuffenecker on 8 October that he had had another attack of dysentery. See Correspondance Gauguin 1984, pp. 247-249.

2. In letter 694 Van Gogh had made a list of things he still wanted to buy for the Yellow House. He had estimated 40 francs for the dressing table with chest of drawers.

3. The ‘copy’ of the letter to Gauguin that Van Gogh includes here (ll. 55 ff.) has been so drastically edited that it is doubtful whether it can really be called a copy in the strict sense of the word: there are numerous crossings-out and insertions, so that it would appear to be an amended version of the letter to Gauguin.

4. This view of the park was Entrance to the public garden (F 566 / JH 1585 ). In letter 703 Van Gogh says he has two paintings of this ‘other garden’ (to distinguish it from the ‘poet’s garden’); the second painting was The public garden with a couple strolling (‘The poet’s garden’) (F 479 / JH 1601 ).

5. See letter 568, n. 3, for this allusion to Voltaire’s Candide.

6. ‘PLM’ is the abbreviation for the ‘Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée’, the railway company that operated this line.

a. Read: ‘chacun’.

7. Van Gogh had made lithographs in The Hague and Nuenen. The cost of the process was a recurring theme in his letters to Theo at the time. See Van Heugten and Pabst 1995. His experiences with lithography did not produce the expected results, and this explains his dismissive attitude here.

8. Van Gogh wrote ‘P.S. to Gauguin’ so that Theo would understand that this remark belonged with the letter to Gauguin; it is in the bottom margin of p. [1r:1], and thus in the letter to Theo.