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But what happened to the festival? (02/28/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		.........T.H.E...W.I.Z.A.R.D...O.F...O.I.S.E......... |----------------Vincent van Gogh still draws painters and pilgrims |--to the Parisian suburb of Auvers-sur-Oise.   BY DAVID DOWNIE The commuter train from Paris' Gare du Nord took about an hour and a quarter to cover the 20 miles to Auvers-sur-Oise, via a bedroom community called Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone. "That's a quarter of an hour more than it took Vincent back in 1890," scoffed the man at the cafe facing Auvers' vintage train station. He sipped his coffee and spread his arms. "When Vincent came out here, the train was direct and we were in the countryside -- farms, the Oise River, thatched houses. It was beautiful, beautiful." Beyond the blue clouds of cigarette smoke curling through the cafe I could make out heavy car traffic. Suburbs hedged in the south side of town. There were two things that turned out to be essential to Auvers in what this loquacious local was saying. First, he called van Gogh "Vincent," as if he knew him. Second, he was obviously suffering from acute nostalgia for a period he couldn't possibly have known. I judged him to be 50ish. Van Gogh came to Auvers on May 21, 1890. He died here at the Auberge Ravoux 70 days later, on July 29, having shot himself in the chest during a fit of the intermittent insanity that came over him throughout his tumultuous 37-year life. It might have been a form of epilepsy or possibly porphyria, a hereditary nervous disorder. Theo van Gogh is thought to have succumbed to it, too; he died six months after his brother, at the age of 34. Vincent and Theo van Gogh were buried in Auvers' otherwise unremarkable cemetery. Since then the village's fame has increased many-fold. Now a town of 9,000 rubbing up against Paris' raw outskirts, Auvers draws about 400,000 van Gogh pilgrims yearly. Most visit the graveyard, Auberge Ravoux and the locales van Gogh painted. Boosters call Auvers the "cradle of impressionism." Before van Gogh arrived, painters the likes of Pissarro, Guillaumin, Monet, Daubigny (of the Barbizon School) and Cézanne lived or worked here from the mid-1800s onward. Vincent remains the star of the show, though, because of his tragic end and the notoriety (and outrageous prices for his paintings) that followed. Having finished our coffees and said goodbye to the chatty man in the cafe facing the train station, we marched a few hundred yards north to the church. It's easy to spot from a mile off: You recognize the gaping-eyed bell tower Vincent immortalized. Notre-Dame-d'Auvers started life at about the time the Normans conquered England, i.e. 1066. But the Romanesque tower and buttressed backside that Vincent loved were built in 1170. Or so said the friendly woman manning the table inside the church. She was eager to show us around, though in truth there wasn't much to see. Apparently we were the only visitors so far on this winter weekday, early in the morning. The cold, musty, echoing sanctuary instilled in us poignant thoughts, however, propitious for van Gogh-hunting. It was my wife who noticed the panel outside the church, flanking the road to the cemetery. The panel showed a full-color reproduction of van Gogh's painting of l'Eglise d'Auvers. As we stood bemused before it, a group of tourists trudged up the hill from their bus and paused. Several framed the panel and the church on the LCD screens of their digital cameras. Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, went the cameras. There was a good deal of jostling. Everyone gave suggestions on how to reproduce the mad genius's framing while also including the panel. A raw-boned white horse roamed freely in a field between the church and the cemetery, which sits on an elevated plateau. This part of Auvers hasn't been developed and looks pretty much the way it would have in 1890. Nearby, another panel showed van Gogh's summertime painting of a wheat field with crows and curling dirt roads. The crows and muddy roads were still there. Caw, caw, caw, croaked the crows as we tramped in the icy muck. In Vincent's day, the view from up here reportedly took in the Oise River, endless farmland and thatched houses (though they were disappearing already in 1890, noted the artist). Now you can't help noticing the inevitable spread of apartment buildings, industry and commerce. To each his age. In the cemetery we somehow managed to miss the maps indicating the whereabouts of the van Gogh brothers' twin tombs. A smiling fellow accompanied us to them. He turned out to be a gravedigger and was disarmingly friendly, like the woman in the church and the man in the cafe by the station. Paris -- right out there across the fields -- seemed a million miles away. We hurried over to have a look at the graves before the busload of other gawkers arrived. To me, the site evoked old-fashioned twin beds, except that here the headboards were lichen-frosted stone knotted with ivy. The gravedigger removed a few decomposed offerings left by van Gogh pilgrims, said farewell to us and disappeared among the tombs. I couldn't help feeling queasy. Here we were, two unwitting pilgrims sighing and looking forlorn, already calling van Gogh by his first name. Vincent. Having failed to find the resting place of Dr. Gachet (the art collector-M.D. who ministered to van Gogh as he lay dying at the Auberge Ravoux) or any other historic personality whose name we recognized, we went back across the plateau to the wheat field panel. On it was a quote from one of Vincent's many letters to Theo: "Immense expanses of wheat under troubled skies, and I don't mind trying to convey the sadness, the extreme solitude." Apparently it was a few hundred yards from this spot, behind the chateau, that Vincent shot himself. I couldn't help wondering how many visitors to Auvers overlook the fact that something about this place drove the mad Dutchman to kill himself. Here. N E X T+P A G E | Daubigny's workshop   PHOTOGRAPH: UPI-CORBIS/BETTMANN _________________________________ For more information: _________________________________