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 cœur_,” 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.
“Le soleil autrefois qui l’enflammait l’endort
D’un sommeil désolé d’affreux sursauts de rêve,
Et l’effroi du futur remplit les yeux de l’Eve.
Dorée: elle soupire en regardant son sein,
Or, stérile scellé par les divins desseins.”
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,
EMILE GAUGUIN.
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