Van Gogh, upon whose shattered nervous organism the shock had spent itself, went voluntarily into a lunatic asylum at Arles, where, as his grip on life grew weaker under the pressure of the inner flame that devoured him, he painted visions of worlds tortured by the sun. Gauguin returned to Brittany, as he said, "armed against all suffering." But he had seen something. In striving to paint Van Gogh's portrait he had seen a vision, once again to quote his own words, of "Jesus preaching goodness and humility." And perhaps, in Vincent's hour of agony, while he lay bloodless and inanimate on the bed in that little room which he had loved and had painted so lovingly, Gauguin had another vision--of the sombre Garden of Gethsemane. Thus maybe there was awakened still more clearly in his spirit that desire for harmony between the flesh and the soul, between nature and God, between the earth and the stars that hang over the earth, which he was to seek desperately to the last and strive to realize, despite the baseness of that other part in him, the civilized, unprimitive part, which strove merely to destroy the harmony and to smile at its work of baseness. [Footnote 1: Gauguin and Van Gogh were actually together from the 20th October to the 23d December, 1888.] PART III: THE SCHOOL OF PONT-AVEN 1889-1891 I In 1889 there opened in Paris on the Champ-de-Mars the Universal Exposition, to celebrate the centennial of the taking of the Bastile. Of this exhibition and of the palace built to house it, nothing now remains except the melancholy Eiffel Tower. The pictures admitted to the exhibition were, rather naturally, of a kind sanctioned by academic officialdom. Wherefore visitors who happened to patronize the Café Volpini near the entrance were doubtless startled to find upon the walls a hundred pictures of a kind calculated to shock all their susceptibilities in art matters. Their perplexity cannot have been greatly lessened by the receipt of a catalogue bearing this title: "Catalogue of the Exposition of Pictures of the Impressionist and Syntheticist Group, held on the Premises of M. Volpini, at the Champ-de-Mars, 1889." The exhibitors were people of whom the respectable patrons of the Café Volpini had for the most part never heard. Their names were:--E. Schuffenecker, Emile Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Louis Roy, Léon Fauché, Georges Daniel, Ludovic Nemo (a pseudonym of Bernard's) and lastly, Paul Gauguin. Lithographs, printed in black upon yellow paper and not less extraordinary than the pictures, were also visible upon request. These were by Bernard and Gauguin.