Marie Cappelle in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (13)

This is one I forgot to add last month. Madame Lafarge (born Marie Cappelle in 1816) was known as 'the poisoner of Tulle' for killing her husband with arsenic in 1840. She served part of her sentence in Montpellier, and was interned in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in St-Rémy-de-Provence (where Van Gogh stayed later) for fifteen months (1851-2). Suffering with tuberculosis, she was released and died in Ussat-les-Bains (Ariège) in November 1852. There are very serious doubts as to whether she did in fact poison her husband.

Marie Cappelle was also a writer of talent and over some years wrote a series of memoirs, most published in her lifetime and a few posthumously.

Vincent Van Gogh in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (13)

In the ancient monastery Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, is a psychiatric hospital to which Van Gogh went after living for a short time in Arles, a town in which he disgraced himself so much that the inhabitants had drawn up a petition to either intern him or banish him. His stay at the hospital was from 8 May 1989 to 16 May 1990, when he left Saint-Rémy for Auvers-sur-Oise, where he killed himself two months later, on 28 July 1990. His time at Saint-Paul-de Mausole was artistically very fruitful for him, and he painted about 150 pictures there, some among his most famous, such as La Nuit étoilée (Starry Night). Parts of it are open to the public.

Rear view of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole and its impressive garden.

The cloister in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole.

The garden within the cloister.

A reconstruction of the kitchen.

This is one of four representations of Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles.

The reconstruction of Van Gogh's room.

The artist had a very good view from his bedroom, which may or may not be like the present view.

A sculpture of Van Gogh by Ossip Zadkine: La lettre de Théo a Vincent'.

Gabriel Sterk's Le Voleur de tournesol, clumsily translated as The Sunflower's Thief.

American sculptor Melvin Klapholz realised this bust in 1996.

All the way along Rue Van Gogh, it is studded with these markers.