Paul Gauguin, the famous French-Peruvian artist—a rebel against the society that rejected him while he lived, and now cherishes his paintings.

ABOVE the village of Atuona was the hill of Calvary, as the French named the Catholic cemetery. Often in the late afternoon I went there to watch the sun go down behind the peak of Temetiu, and to muse over what might come into my mind. My first visit had been with Charles Le Moine, the school teacher of Vaitahu, and the only painter living in the Marquesas. We had gone to search for the grave of Paul Gauguin, the famous French-Peruvian artist, and had found no trace of it.

“That woman who swore to keep it right has buried another lover since,” said Le Moine, cynically.

A small man, with a long French nose, a red, pointed beard and mustache, twinkling blue eyes, and dressed in faded denim, Le Moine, though many years in these archipelagos, was out of the Latin Quarter. Two front teeth missing, he had a childish air; one thought his whiskers might be a boy’s joke. He was a blageur about life, but he was very serious about painting, and utterly without thought of else.

“I work at anything the Government will give me to earn leisure and a bare living so as to paint here,” he said.

Alas! Le Moine was not a great artist. His pictures were so-so. Doubtless the example and fame of Gauguin inspired him to achieve. We had often talked of him.

“When he died,” said Le Moine, “I was here, and I attended the night services in the church over his remains. The chief gendarme or agent special, like Bauda now, took charge of his house and effects. You may imagine the care he took when I tell you that Gauguin was under sentence to prison for reviling the gendarme and the law. He auctioned off everything with a jest, and made fun of the dead man and his work. He said to us: ‘Gauguin is dead. He leaves many debts, and nothing here to pay for them, but a few paintings without value. He was a decadent painter.’ Gauguin would have expected that. I had only a few sous, but was able to buy what I needed most, his brushes and palette. Peyral got ‘Niagara Falls,’ as the gendarme shouted its name. It was Gauguin’s last picture; a Brittany village in winter, snow everywhere, a few houses and trees, and the dusk in blue and red and violet tones. He made that, mon ami, when he was dying. It was his reaching back to his old painting ground in his last thoughts. I think Peyral sold it to Polonsky, the Tahitian banker, who was here looking to buy anything of Gauguin. Lutz got his cane, carved by Gauguin, and the other things went for a trifle, including the house, which was torn down for the lumber, because nobody here wanted a studio. I admired Gauguin, but he had nothing to do with me because I was white and of the Government. He was absorbed with the Marquesans, and to them he was all kindness and generosity. He was the simplest educated white man in his needs I have ever known, and I myself, as you know, have few demands. Gauguin wanted drink, paint and canvas. He always kept a bottle of absinthe in a little pool by his house.”

Lying Bill had said that Gauguin was a seaman.

“’Is ’ands was as tough an’ rough as mine,” said Captain Pincher. “’E’d been to sea on merchant ships an’ in the French navy. Gauguin was no bloomin’ pimp like most artists. ’E knew every rope in the schooner, an’ could reef an’ steer. ’E looked like a Spaniard, an’ ’e could drink like a Yarmouth bloater. Many a time I brought ’im absinthe to Atuona on my ship. But ’e was a ’ard worker. I used to sit with ’im sometimes when ’e’d play ’is organ. ’E wasn’t bad at it, either. Women didn’t care much for ’im. ’E never made much of them, but ’e ’ad plenty. A bleedin’ queer frog, ’e was.”

“He was a chic type.” said Song of the Nightingale, the prisoner-cook of the palace. Song said chick tippee, but he meant that Gauguin was a good man to know. “When there was a big storm here, and all the land of the man next to him was washed away by the river, Gauguin gave him a piece. Ea! He gave him, too, a paper which made the land his. The family has it to-day, and they are my relatives.”

Pastor Vernier, Father David, Peyral, Flag, Song of the Nightingale, and others had spoken of Gauguin, but his name never came to their lips spontaneously. Being dead ten years, he was as never having been, to the Marquesans. To Vernier his note was of small interest and to the vicar apostolic an annoyance. In these seas when a man was dead he was forgotten unless he had left an estate, or his ghost walked. The Marquesan and the Paumotuan held the dead in great fear at times, but not in reverence. The spirit of the artist had remained with his body, and that was lost in the matted earth of the graveyard on the height. His dust had long ago united with the cocoanut-palms that rose from his burial-place on that lonely hill. The purple blossoms of the pahue vine, which crawled over his unmarked grave and sent its shoots to search the heart of the unhappiest of men, were the only tribute ever laid there. The woman who had vowed to keep its formal outline unbroken and to bedew it with her tears smiled at my recalling it. Gauguin here was a name’s faint echo, but in America and Europe they bartered for Gauguin’s pictures as if they were of gold, schools of imitators and emulators were active, and novelists and critics seized upon his utterances and deeds, his savage ways and maddening canvases, to fit fictional characters to them, or to tell over and over again the mystifying story of his career and his work. Here, among the fascinating scenes nature fashions for those who love its extravagances, he died in poverty. More is paid to-day for one of his pictures than he earned in a lifetime.

The man Gauguin persisted as a legend wherever painting or Polynesia was much discussed. There was in him a seed of anarchism, a harking back to the absolute freedom of the individual, a fierce hatred of the overlordship of money and fixed decency, of comme il faut, which lightened the eye of many conforming people, as a glimpse of light through a distant door in a dark tunnel. In this stark, brooding, wounded insurrecto, this child of France and the ardent tropic of South America, each of us who had suffered, and rebelled, if only in our hearts, gained a vicarious expression, and an outlet for our atavistic and fearful desires. Time that had led man from the anthropoid to the artist had betrayed Gauguin. He had yielded to the impulse we all feel at times, and had tried to escape from the cage formed by heredity, habits, and the thoughts of his countrymen. Space he had conquered, and in these wilds was hidden from the eyes of civilization, but time he could not blot out, for he was of his age, and even its leader in the evolution of painting. The savage in man he let take control of himself, or willed it to be, and was spoiled by the inexorable grasp upon him of his forebears and his decades of Europe. He was saturated with the ennui of the West. He wanted to be primitive, and had to use morphine, absinthe, and organ music to remain in the East. He asserted that he wanted to be “wise and a barbarian.” He was a great artist but no barbarian.

He wrote: “Civilization is falling from me little by little. Under the continual contact with pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. I am beginning to think simply, to feel very little hatred for my neighbor—rather, to love him. All the joys, animal and human, are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature. In the certitude of a succession of days like this present one, equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.”

He never knew peace. His was a tortured soul and body, torn by conflicting desires, and absence of the fame and slight fortune he craved. He had courage and stoicism. In scores of letters to his friend Montfried he complained of his fate, of his desperate poverty, his lack of painting materials, the bourgeois whites about him, and his lack of recognition in Europe. He wanted to return there, and Montfried had to tell him in plain terms that he would destroy by his presence in Paris any sale there was for his pictures. Gauguin realized that, for it carried out his own motto, one that he had put over his door: “Be mysterious and you will be happy!”

Gauguin was like all cultivated whites who go to the South Seas after manhood, like me, unfitted by the poisons of civilization to survive in a simple, semi-savage environment. We demand the toxins of our machine bringing-up and racial ideals, as the addict his drug. Gauguin was already forty-three when he stepped ashore at Tahiti, and fifty-three when he came to the Marquesas, but at least he had put into a proper milieu his portrait of himself made when he said to his opponents, in Paris: “I am a savage. Every human work is a revelation of the individual. All I have learned from others has been an impediment to me. I know little, but what I do know is my own.”

Paul Gauguin was dead at fifty-five. An ancestor was a centenarian. The family was famed in its environment for its vitality, but Paul wasted his energy in bitter blows against the steel shield of society, and spoiled his body with the vices of both savage and civilized.

“He was smiling when I saw him dead,” said Mouth of God, who had served him for the love of him.

That smile was his ever-brave defiance of life, but, too, a thought for France—for the France he adored, and which he dreamed of so often though it had rejected him. That last picture, painted in these humid Marquesas in his house set in a grove of cocoanut-palms and breadfruit-trees, was of Brittany and was a snow scene. He did not defeat his enemy, but sank into his last sleep content to go because the struggle had become too anguishing. He knew he was beaten, but he flew no flag of surrender. He passed alone, with only the smile as a token of his final moment of consciousness, and the emotion that stirred his soul.

As was said best by his friend and biographer, Charles Morice, Gauguin was one of the most necessary artists of the nineteenth century. His name now signified a distinctive conception of the nature of art, a certain spirit of creation and mastery of strange technique, and a revolt against established standards and methods which constituted an opposition to the accepted thoughts and morals of art—if not a school, at least a distinct class of graphic achievement. As the French say, it was a catÉgorie. For the conservatives, the regular painters and critics, he had created un frisson nouveau, a new shudder in art, as Hugo said Baudelaire had in literature.

Gauguin was not a distinguished writer. “Noa Noa” was written by his friend, Morice, in Paris, from letters to him. The painter commented upon the book that it was “not the result of an ordinary collaboration, that is, of two authors working in common, but that I had the idea, speaking for non-civilized people, to contrast their characters with ours, and I had enough originality to write it simply, just like a savage, and to ask Morice, for his part, to put it in civilized words.” His “Intimate Journals” are actually revelatory of the man, but “Noa Noa” is a tropical dish seasoned with sophistries, though beautiful, and, to a large degree, true. It is a poetical interpretation by Morice, a Parisian, of Gauguin’s adventures in Tahiti.

Gauguin spent little time in writing. Every fiber of his weakening body and every lucubration of his mind were bent on expressing himself in painting, or in clay or wood, but he thought clearly and individualistically, and wrote forcefully and with wit. He was not a poet, nor had he felicity of language.

I revived Gauguin’s memory in the South Seas. Having known about him in Tahiti, I was interested to find out all I could of his brief life and sorrowful death here. Lovaina, the best known woman in the South Seas, at whose Hotel TiarÉ I lived in Tahiti, spoke of Gauguin one day. She had heard a whisper between Temanu and Taata-Mata, two of her handmaids, that I might leave the TiarÉ, her impossible auberge in Papeete, to lodge with Madame Charbonnier or Madame Fanny.

Lovaina, three quarters American by blood, but all Tahitian in looks, language, and heart, was not assured that her impossible hotel was the only possible one within thousands of miles, as it was really, and she said:

“Berina, I think more better you go see that damn house before you make one bargain. You know what Gauguin say. He have room with Madame Charbonnier, and eve’y day, some time night, she come make peep his place. He had glass door between that room for him and for other man, and he say one day to me (I drink one Pernod with him):

“‘That sacrÉ French women she make peep me. I beelong myself. I make one damn pictu’e stop that.’

“You go look for yourse’f to-day. You see that door. Gauguin say he make ugly so nobody make look.”

“That Gauguin was a very happy man in my maison,” said Madame Charbonnier in French to me. “He and I had but one disagreement. One day a native woman accompanied him here. I knew he must have models, but I want no hussies in my house. I am a respectable citizeness of France. I looked through the glass door, and I warned him, though he had paid in advance, I must preserve my reputation. O, la la la! He painted that mauvaise picture of that very Tahitian girl on my door to spite me. La voila! Is it not affrighting?”

It was a double-panelled door, and a separate painting covered each; to the left a seated girl wearing a pareu and to the right a girl playing the vivo, the Tahitian flute, a female figure standing, and the white rabbit Gauguin introduced afterward into many paintings. I might have bought the door of Madame Charbonnier or somewhat similar windows and doors in another house occupied by Gauguin for a hundred francs or perhaps two or three times that much. At any rate, for an inconsiderable sum, because they had no value as examples of the painter’s ability nor were they intrinsically beautiful or attractive. Stephen Haweis, a talented English artist, who was there with me, bought the door, and W. Somerset Maugham a window, which I saw afterward in a New York gallery for sale at some thousands of dollars.

I was mentioning Gauguin’s name at Mataiea, in Tahiti, at the house of the chief of that district, Tetuanui, a gentleman of charming manners and great knowledge of things Tahitian. Rupert Brooke and I had walked to the ancient marai, or temple, and the poet and I had tried to rebuild the ruin in our imagination. I had seen marais better preserved, and I had talked with many who had studied their formation and history.

This one, very famous in the annals of Tahiti, was not far from Tetuanui’s home, and on it had been enacted strange and bloody sacrifices in the days of heathenry. It was on the sea-shore, and, indeed, much of it had fallen into the water, or the surf had encroached upon the land. We had spent some hours about it, and had wondered about the people who had made it their cathedral a few score years ago. Here we were living with their grandchildren. The father of the chief’s father might have participated in the ceremonies there, might have seen the king accept and eat the eye of a victim, or feign to do so, for cannibalism had long passed in Tahiti even a century ago.

Walking back to Mataiea, we met the chief returning from his day’s labor directing the repair of roads, for, though a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a former warrior for the French against tribes of other islands, Tetuanui had small means, and was forced to be a civil servant of the conquerers.

“We have been to see the marai,” said Brooke.

“Oia mau anei teie?” replied Tetuanui. “Is that so? I have not been there for a long time. The last time was with that white painter Gauguin. He lived near here, and one day I spoke of the marai, and he asked me to show it to him. We walked down there together, but he was disappointed that it was so broken down.”

Once again the chevalier gave me a glimpse of the barbarian. He and his amiable wife took occasional boarders, and there were two San Francisco salesgirls there for a week. They were shocked at our bathing nude in the lagoon in front of the house, although we wore loin-cloths to walk to the beach and back. They complained to the chief, who was astonished, for Brooke was strikingly handsome, and the Tahitian girls were open in their praise of his beauty.

“They should have seen that Gauguin,” said Tetuanui, as he begged our pardon for telling their indignation. “He was always semi-nude and often nude. He became as brown as a Tahitian in a few months. He liked to lie in the sun, and I have seen him at the hottest part of the day sitting at his easel. You know, he had a wife here in the way that the whites take our women, and one day he and she were in swimming, and came out on the road before putting on pareus. A good missionary complained of them—it was not quite proper, truly, and the gendarme warned both of them. Gauguin was furious, for he hated the gendarmes before that.”

Ten years were gone since Gauguin, having fled from Tahiti and a fate that he could not escape, had expired here in Atuona in a singular though anguished resignation. His atelier and dwelling had been just below Peyral’s on the opposite side of the road I trod so often to and from the beach, and Peyral had known him as well as such a man can know a master. Mouth of God, the husband of Malicious Gossip, saw Gauguin dead in his house, and it was he who told me that Kahuiti, the recent cannibal chief, had a tiki made by Gauguin. I went to Taaoa, past the Stinking Springs and the house of Mademoiselle Narbonne, to see it.

I remembered that James Huneker said, “In the huts of the natives where cataloguing ceases, many pictures may be found.”

Kahuiti had one, and dear to the heart of that remarkable anthropophagus. It was a striking figure of an old god, and a couple of feet square, and in the painter’s most characteristic style.

When I asked him to sell it to me, he opened wide those large brown eyes which had looked a hundred times at the advancing spear, and had watched the cooking of his slain enemy. He said nothing but the words, “Tiki hoa pii! An image by my dear friend!”

I smoked a pipe with him, and went back to Atuona thoughtful.

Gauguin made many enemies, but he kept his friends even in death.

“Toujours tout a vous de coeur,” he had signed his letters to his one or two friends, with rare sincerity.

Gauguin had deserted Tahiti because of his frequent quarrels with the representatives of the Government there, and with the church. He precipitated a similar situation in Atuona almost immediately. In his “Intimate Journals,” he tells of it:

The first news that reached me on my arrival at Atuona was that there was no land to be bought or sold, except at the mission.... Even so, as the bishop was away, I should have to wait a month. My trunks and a shipment of building lumber waited on the beach. During this month, as you can well imagine, I went to mass every Sunday, forced as I was to play the rÔle of a good Catholic and a railer against the Protestants. My reputation was made, and His reverence, without suspecting my hypocrisy, was quite willing (since it was I) to sell me a small plot of ground filled with pebbles and underbrush for 650 francs. I set to work courageously, and, thanks once more to some men recommended by the bishop, I was soon settled.

Hypocrisy has its good points. When my hut was finished, I no longer thought of making war on the Protestant pastor, who was a well-brought-up young man with a liberal mind besides; nor did I think any longer of going to church. A chicken had come along, and war had begun again. When I say a chicken I am modest, for all the chickens had arrived, and without any invitation. His Reverence is a regular goat, while I am a tough old cock and fairly well-seasoned. If I said the goat began it, I should be telling the truth. To want to condemn me to a vow of chastity! That’s a little too much; nothing like that, Lizette!

To cut two superb pieces of rose-wood and carve them after the Marquesan fashion was child’s play for me. One of them represented a horned devil (the bishop), the other a charming woman with flowers in her hair. It was enough to name her ThÉrÈse for every one without exception, even the school-children, to see in it an allusion to this celebrated love affair. Even if this is all a myth, still it was not I who started it.

Pastor Vernier told me of his acquaintance with Gauguin and of his last days. Vernier acknowledged that he had never been his friend. I would have known that, for to Gauguin, professors of theology were as absurd and abhorrent as he to them.

Gauguin’s residence was a half-mile away from Vernier’s. Two years he had lived there after ten in Tahiti. Always disappointment, always bodily suffering, and the reaction from alcohol and drugs; an invalid a dozen years.

“He was a savage, but a charming man,” said Pastor Vernier to me. “I could have nothing to say to him, ordinarily, and he did not seek me out. He had no respect for the law and less for the bon Dieu. The Catholics especially he quarreled with, for he made a caricature of the Bishop, and of a native woman, about whom there was a current scandal. It was common talk, and the natives laughed uproariously, which angered the bishop greatly. It was unfit to be seen by a savage. You can imagine it!

“I had not seen him for some time when I had a note from Gauguin, scrawled on a piece of wrapping-paper. It said:

“Will it be asking too much for you to come to see me? My sight is all of a sudden leaving me. I am very ill, and cannot move.”

“I went down the trail to his house, and found Mouth of God with him, as also the old Tioka. His legs were terribly ulcerated. He had on a red loin-cloth and a green tam-o’-shanter cap. His skin was as red as fire from the eczema he had long been afflicted with, and the pain must have been very severe. He shut his lips tight at moments, but he did not groan. He talked of art for an hour or two, passionately advocating his ideas, and without reference to his approaching end. I think he sent for me for conversation and no more. It was then he presented me with books and his portrait of MallarmÉ.

“We chatted long and I was filled with admiration for the courage of Gauguin and his prepossession with painting, at the expense of his doleur. About a fortnight later I went back when Tioka summoned me, and found him worse, but still forgetful of everything else but his art. It was the eighth of May Tioka came again. Gauguin now was in agony. He had had periods of unconsciousness. He must have known his danger, but he talked fitfully of Flaubert and of Poe, of ‘SalammbÔ’ and of ‘Nevermore.’ When I said adieu he was praising Poe as the greatest poet in English.

“A few hours afterward I heard the shouts of the natives that Gauguin was dead.

“‘Haoe mate!’ they called to me. ‘The white is dead.’

“I found Gauguin on his cot, one leg hanging down to the floor. Tioka was urging him in Marquesan to speak, and was rubbing his chest. I took his arms and tried to cause respiration, but in vain. He was already beginning to grow cold. Do you know, Monsieur Americain, that the vicar went down there at night before I was aware of it, and, though Gauguin despised him and his superstitions, forced an entrance and, had the body carried to the Catholic Cemetery, with mass, candles, and other mummeries.”

The good Vicar, PÈre David, had another tale. He told it over our wine at the mission. My House of the Golden Bed was but the toss of a mango away, and we often discussed the fathers, especially Anthony, Jerome, and Francis of Assisi.

“It is not true,” he said, plucking his long, black beard nervously, as was his wont. “Gauguin was born in the church. Did he not tell me he was the descendant of a Borgia? He was at the Jesuits’ school. The devil got hold of him early. Ah, that France is punished for its breaking of the Concordat. Napoleon knew what was needed. Gauguin did make much trouble here. I do not care what he did to the Government. That Government is usually atheist. But he made an obscene image of the bishop. He never entered our mission, after he had secured his land from us, and labor to build his house. He derided the sacred things of religion, and when he came to die he sent for the Protestant. I had hoped always that he would recant his atheism and change his ways. He was immoral, but then so is nearly everybody here except the fathers, and the nuns. That very pastor—Non! I guard my secret. Mais, it is not a secret, for all the world knows. N’importe! I close my lips.”

He was determined to be charitable, but, as for me, I knew the charge well, and had disproved it by personal research. John Kekela, the Hawaiian, had sworn on the Bible given his father by Kalakaua, the last Hawaiian king, that it was a lie, and Kekela would know for sure, and would not kiss the book falsely for fear of death or, at least, the dreaded fefe, which makes one’s legs as big as those of an elephant.

“But despite the antagonism of Gauguin to the church and his immorality, you took charge of his body and gave him a Catholic funeral,” I said.

“Who am I to judge the soul of a man?” replied the vicar, deprecatingly, his right hand lifted in appeal. “He was alone in his last moments. Doubtless the Holy Virgin or perhaps even the patron of the Marquesas, the watchful Joan of Arc, aided him. Each one has his guardian angel who never deserts him. When the shadows of death darken the room, then does that angel fight with the demons for the soul of his charge. I learned that Gauguin was dead from the catechist. Daniel Vaimai. It was then evening of the day he had died, and I had been ministering to a sick woman in Hanamate, an hour’s ride away. I met Daniel Vaimai at the cross-roads and he informed me of Gauguin’s death. I felt deeply sorry that he had not had the holy oils in his extremity, and had not received absolution after confession, but the devil is like a roaring lion of Afrique, seeking what he may devour.”

“He is especially active here,” I ventured, interested as I am in all such vital matters. The vicar, who had been talking animatedly and gazing at an invisible congregation, fixed his eyes on me.

“Here in the Marquesas and wherever whites are,” he replied acridly. “But to return to Gauguin! I immediately arranged for the interment of the dead man the next morning. In this climate decay follows death fast. As a matter of fact, some of us, including two of the FrÈres de la doctrine chrÈtienne, had hastened to Gauguin’s house when his death was announced the day before. They had planned his funeral for two o’clock the next morning, but we made it a trifle earlier, and removed him to the church of Atuona shortly after one. There we had mass for the dead, and did the poor cadavre all honor, or, rather, we thought of the soul that had fled to its punishment or reward. We carried the body to Calvary and put it in the earth.”

“I find no stone nor any mark at all of his grave,” I said.

“Peut-Être, that may well be,” said the vicar calmly. “I do not know if one was placed. He had no kin here nor intimates other than natives.”

“But Pastor Vernier says Gauguin had asked long ago to be buried with civil rites only, and that he had wanted to assist in them. He says that you deceived him as to the hour of removal to the church, and that when he arrived at two o’clock Gauguin was already in the mission which he could not enter.”

The vicar shrugged his shoulders.

“I cannot enter into a controversy as to what Vernier says. Gauguin was of Catholic parentage. Have I not said he claimed to be a descendant of a Borgia, and Borgias were popes? What more or less could the church have done? Stern as that Mother may be to wayward children in life, she spares no effort even in death to comfort those remaining, and to help by prayer and ceremony the spirit that wrestles with purgatory. We ever give the benefit of the doubt. A second before he succumbed to that heart stroke, or the laudanum, Gauguin may have asked for forgiveness. Only God knows that, and in His infinite mercy He may have bestowed on him that final penitence. You will not forget the thief on Calvary.”

That villainous Song of the Nightingale might have given success to my quest for the grave of Gauguin. I cannot remember now that I ever mentioned to him my looking for it. He pointed it out to a recent governor of the Marquesas Islands, Dr. L. Sasportas, who, in a letter to Count Charles du Parc, now of San Francisco, tells of it:

Gauguin, of whom you wrote, had not departed from the tradition of adopting native customs; and unfortunately, his influence among the Marquesans was rather bad than good. I have gathered some details about him, which may interest those who know that sad end of this talented painter who came to the Marquesas, to escape the civilized world, its taxes, ugliness and evils. He found here the government, police, the tax collector, etc. If these islands enjoy an eternal summer, disease is not lacking in them.

Gauguin, morphinomaniac, lived close to a bottle of absinthe that he kept fresh in his well. He was condemned to serve in jail for three months, and one morning he was found dead near-by a phial of laudanum. He committed suicide. Nothing remains of him. His house has been demolished, and his land is a field of potatoes. His last paintings have been carried away, not by admirers, but by merchants who did not ignore the value of his work.

My wife and I went once to a little French cemetery which lies on top of the hill and among a hundred Christian tombs we looked for Gauguin’s. About three quarters of the crosses, worm-eaten, had fallen. One after the other we threw them over to find the name of Gauguin. It was in vain. After we had come down, we inquired of our cook, prisoner and drunkard, who lived here at the time of Gauguin. We learned that the tomb was for a long time abandoned. We finally found it, and we had a wreath of natural flowers that he loved so much, rose-laurel, hibiscus, gardenia and others, placed upon the spot. They are decayed now, alas, as is Gauguin.

That again was Gauguin. Fleeing from Europe, from civilization, from the redingote, and even there, in that most distant isle, thousands of miles from any mainland, being pursued by the gendarme! Had he not abandoned Tahiti after a decade for a wilder spot, yet a thousand miles farther, hidden in a bywater of the vast ocean, and in the “great cannibal isle of Hiva-Oa” been harassed by the law and the church?

He saw there was no escape, and that, after all, the fault was in him. He demanded the impossible from a world corrupted to its horizon. He, too, could say of himself, as he wrote of the Tahitians, and then of the Marquesans:

The gods are dead and I am dead of their death.

“He had verses on that god he made for his garden,” said Le Moine. “They began:

‘Les dieux sont mort et Atuona meurt de leur mort.’

That was it. Gauguin was like the Marquesans of his, of my, village of Atuona. Their old gods were dead, and they perished of the lack of spiritual substance.

Le Moine was to go mad, and to die, as I would have if I had not fled. The air was one of death.

When I returned to America and wrote of Gauguin, I received a letter from his son:

... novel couldn’t hurt Gauguin as an artist. We men aren’t insulted when apes yelp at us; but we are sometimes obliged to live amongst them, so when you defend Gauguin against the quadrumanes, you make it easier for his son to move in their midst.

I therefore thank you and beg you to believe me your most grateful friend and admirer,