French impressions

Two men had a terrible fight two days before Christmas in 1888. One was the tortured artist Vincent van Gogh, who later that night cut off part of his left ear, wrapped it in a cloth and left the maimed piece of flesh at a brothel. The other was fellow painter Paul Gauguin, who left town the next day. The two men never saw each other again.

The infamous altercation happened in Arles, Provence, a pretty town in the South of France.

I’m in Arles as the starting point of a week-long Avalon Waterways Active & Discovery cruise along the Rhône, travelling north to Lyon on board . As guide Cyprien shows a small group of us around sun-baked and postcard-pretty Arles, in contrast to van Gogh, I couldn’t be happier here. Cyprien tells us van Gogh worshipped Gauguin and was devastated when the more confident artist decided to return to Paris, dashing van Gogh’s dreams of setting up an artists’ colony. The Dutchman only