On my return from a little trip I found both your letter1 and your proof etching.2 De Haan and I had been to spend 5 days in Pont-Aven, my former residence which is 6 leagues from Le Pouldu.

Your letter doesn’t tell me very much: if you’ve seen my canvases in Paris at Goupil’s, what do you think of them! If my planned journey to Madagascar appears unreasonable to you. I dream of it every day, to the point where I’m scarcely working at all at the moment, wanting to rest a little, gain new strength for down there. 1r:2

And you, you’re insatiable; I see that you haven’t been losing any time in Auvers. It’s good, though, to rest the mind and the body sometimes.

Your idea of coming to Brittany at Le Pouldu seems excellent to me if it could be put into effect. For we are, De Haan and I, in a little hole far from the town. Without any communication other than a hired cart. And for a sick man who needs a doctor, it’s sometimes risky. At Pont-Aven it’s different, there’s a doctor and people. In addition, if I manage to sort things out to go to Madagascar I’ll no longer be here 1v:3 at the beginning of September, like De Haan, who’s going to go back to Holland. That, in all honesty, is the situation. And however God knows how much it would please me to see our friend Vincent close to us.

I don’t know Doctor Gachet but I’ve often heard père Pissarro speak of him. And it must be pleasant for you to have someone close to you who sympathizes with your work, your ideas.

Alas, I see myself condemned to be less and less understood, and I must hold fast to following 1v:4 my way alone, to drag out an existence without a family like a pariah. So the solitude in the woods seems to me in the future to be a new and almost dreamed-of paradise. The savage will return to savagery.