We talked first of the horses in the lagoon a dozen yards from us, their grooms or their owners submerging them, and squatting on the ground to chat as the horses wallowed willingly in five feet of salt water.  We agreed that the Tahitians were as bad drivers as the Chinese, and that they were, wittingly or unwittingly, cruel to their beasts of burden.  This led to a discussion of native traits, and he was caustic in his castigation of the Tahitians.  He asked me my name and what brought me to Tahiti; and when, wanting to be as honest-spoken as he, I said, “Romance, adventure,” he burst out that I was crazy.

“I have been here seventeen years,” he said bitterly—­“me, Ivan Stroganoff, who was once happy as secretary to the governor of Irkutsk!  I was better off when I was on the Merrimac fighting the Monitor, or with Mosby, the guerilla, than I am in this accursed island.  I think a man is mad who can leave Tahiti and stays here.  I wish I could go away.  I would like to die elsewhere.  I am eighty years old, I starve here, and I sleep in a chicken-coop in the suburbs.”

“You are lodged exactly as was Charlie Stoddard, who wrote ’South Sea Idylls,’” I interposed.

“They have lied always, those writers about Tahiti,” said Ivan Stroganoff.  “Melville, Loti, Moerenhout, Pallander, your Stevenson,—­I don’t know that Stoddard,—­all are meretricious, with their pomp of words and no truth.  I have comparisons to make with other nations.  I am more than sixty years a traveler, and I am here seventeen years without cessation, in hell all the time.”

“You Russians always like the French.  How about their achievements here?” I questioned, hoping to lift his shade of melancholy.

“The French?” he repeated.  “They are brigands and weak governors.  They have been in Tahiti four generations.  Do you want to know how they got hold here?  A monarchy, a foolish Louis, sent a marine savant and soldier named Dumont D’Urville to the South Seas with the casual orders: 

“’D’apprivoiser les hommes, et de rendre les femmes un peu plus sauvages;’ to tame the men and make the women a little more savage.  The French did both, and took all of this part of the world they could find unseized by Europe, and tamable, at not too great a shedding of French blood.  They said that it was their duty to restore Temoana his kingdom in the Marquesas Islands, eight hundred miles from here, northward, Temoana had been a singer of psalms at the Protestant mission in his valley of Tai-o-hae, in the island of Nukahiva, a victim of shanghaiers, a cook on a whaler, a tattooed man in English penny shows, a repatriate, a protege of the Catholic archbishop of the Marquesans, and finally, through the influence of the Roman church, a king.  He worked damned hard for the French flag and the church, and the generous colonial bureau of France paid his widow a pension of ten dollars a month until she died of melancholy among the nuns.  I knew her and I knew men who knew him.  He was given a gorgeous uniform of gold lace by his promoters, which I think killed him, though when he sweated, he would strip to his handsomely marked skin and sit naked in the breeze.  The queen never wore more than a diaper or a gown.