W21 1 Auvers, c. 20 May 1890
My Dear Sister,
For a number of days now I have been wanting to reply to your kind letter which I received at St. Rémy. I could not stick it out there any longer, and I got rather worse in consequence of the treatment. In Paris it was a great joy for me to see Theo again, and to make the acquaintance of Jo and the little one. Jo made an excellent impression of me; she is charming and very simple and brave. Yes, it seems to me that things are going as well as possible for the moment.
And as for myself, at the moment I am still afraid of the noise and the bustle of Paris, and I immediately went off into the country �to an old village. Here there are moss covered thatched roofs which are superb,
and which I am certainly going to do something with.
Moreover, I think that the doctor to whose care I am entrusted will absolutely leave me to my own devices,
as if there were nothing the matter with me.
And those last days at St. Rémy I still worked as in a frenzy. Great bunches of flowers, violet irises, big bouquets of roses, landscapes.
After I went away it was funny to see all my canvases from the beginning again.
But I should very much have liked you to see the olive orchards which I have brought with me now, with their very different skies of yellow, pink and blue colours. I think these are canvases which have never been painted until now in quite this manner. Up to the present the others have always painted them in grey tones.
I was enormously pleased to see the exhibition at the Champ de Mars, where were a great number of things that I liked very much.
[The rest of the letter is missing.]
1. Written in French.