Every Johnson has his Boswell, though he may be mute, unrecording, and sterile, and every sadist has his masochist. The young Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh, a constitutional psychopath, whose mental aberrations took him into spiritual exhortation, social reformation, and finally "art," often tried to kill Gauguin. When the latter showed himself versed in mayhem Van Gogh made his bed, lit his pipe, wrapped himself in serenity and shot himself in the abdomen, as lunatics often do. Not so Dick Stroeve, Strickland's fidus Achates. He worshipped Strickland, who reviled him, kicked him, spat upon him; Stroeve, who naïvely asks, "Have I ever been mistaken?" in his estimate of artists, knew that Strickland was a great artist, greater than Manet or Corot, more puissant than El Greco or Cézanne, and that he had been sent to complete the cycle which Delacroix and Turner ushered in. Stroeve, a passive, asexual creature, had married a temperamental English governess in Rome, where he had earned the soubriquet of "le Maître de la Boîte à Chocolats" after she had had a disastrous experience with the son of an Italian prince whose children she had been hired to instruct. When Strickland falls desperately ill from the combined effects of insufficient food, touting for prurient Anglicans, and translating the advertisements of French patent medicines that "restore" Doctor Maugham's countrymen to such a degree that they may go to Paris with pleasurable anticipation, Stroeve takes him to his house, despite the strenuous opposition and pathetic protests of Mrs. Stroeve, whose previous fleeting contacts with Strickland echoed the call of the wild in her and presaged disaster. From the moment he arrived the fat was in the fire. No affinities are so difficult to keep from blending as sex affinities, facetiously called soul affinities by the newspapers. Strickland's spark was fanned lovingly into glow by Stroeve, and when it flamed he threw Stroeve out of his house, possessed complaisant Mrs. Stroeve violently, and then put her on canvas, nude, "one arm beneath her head and the other along her body, one knee raised, the other leg stretched out." After nature's cataclysm had spent itself, Mrs. Stroeve committed suicide in approved feminine fashion by taking a corroding acid, without condoning her husband's offense--that of being virtuous. When she died Stroeve, a true masochist, looked up Strickland, forgave him, invited him to go with him to Holland, because "we both loved Blanche. There would have been room for him in my mother's house. The company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good." But Strickland, becoming for the moment verbally more expansive, replied: "I have other fish to fry." When Mr. Maugham spoke to him about Stroeve's visit he said: "I thought it damned silly and sentimental."