He wrote eight hundred and twenty of the surviving letters

Nine hundred and three letters survive. Eight hundred and twenty of them are his. Whatever else the correspondence records, it records that one party was doing most of the writing.

The money was regular. A hundred and fifty francs a month, paid in three parts — on the first, the tenth and the twentieth — and he said the split suited him better than one payment would have. It is the least dramatic fact in the file and it carries more than any of the dramatic ones.

A regular allowance is not poverty and it is not comfort. It is a schedule. The version in which there was never any money does not survive the dates on which it arrived.

A picture sold in Brussels in 1890, for four hundred francs, to another painter. How many others went is not known. The figure everyone repeats is wrong, and the honest answer is that nobody has one.

That is the shape this page imitates: the ground laid at length, the case made in full, and the request still one sentence away at the foot of the last page. The letter it writes for you is complete in every part except the one it was for.

Determination: the correspondence is the achievement and the arithmetic is ordinary. A hundred and fifty francs on three fixed days, four hundred francs once in Brussels, and eight hundred and twenty letters going one way.