Van Gogh: The Last Bullet and the Story Hidden in Auvers

On the evening of 27 July 1890, Vincent van Gogh returned to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, with a bullet in his chest. He covered more than a kilometre from the fields to the village with that wound, then lay for two days and died in the arms of his brother Theo on the morning of 29 July. He was not carrying the gun. Nobody saw the shot. Textbooks still tell a clean story: an artist in a mental crisis walked into a wheat field and shot himself.

That clean story breaks on three stubborn details from the same night. The bullet entered low on his body, in a spot he could hardly have reached with a gun in his own hand. No gun was ever found, even though the wounded man still had the strength to walk more than a kilometre home. And nobody ever pinned down the place where the shot was fired. These are not three loose oddities. They lock together around one possibility: a second person stood in that field and carried the gun away.