This was Monsieur Charles le Moine, the painter from Vait-hua, whose studio I had invaded in his absence from that delightful isle.  We sat long over breakfast coffee and cigarettes, I, charmed by his conversation, he, eager to hear news of the world he had forsaken.  He had studied in Paris, been governor of the Gambier Islands, and at last had made his final home among the palms and orchids of these forgotten isles.  His life had narrowed to his canvases, on which he sought to interpret Marquesan atmosphere and character, its beauty and savage lure.

I said to him that it was a pity many great painters did not come here to put on canvas the fading glamor and charm of the Marquesas.

“Our craft is too poor,” he replied with a sigh.  “A society built on money does not give its artists and singers the freedom they had in the old days in these islands, my friend.  We are bound to a wheel that turns relentlessly.  Who can come from France and live here without money?  Me, I must work as gendarme and school-teacher to be able to paint even here.  One great painter did live in this valley, and died here—­Paul Gauguin.  He was a master, my friend!”

“Paul Gauguin lived here?” I exclaimed.  I had known, of course, that the great modernist had died in the Marquesas, but I had never heard in which valley, and no one in Atuona had spoken of him.  In Florence I had met an artist who possessed two glass doors taken from Madame Charbonnier’s house and said to have been painted by Gauguin in payment for rent.  I had been in Paris when all artistic France was shuddering or going into ecstacies over Gauguin’s blazing tropic work, when his massive, crude figures done in violent tones, filled with sinister power, had been the conversation of galleries and saloons.

Strindberg wrote of Gauguin’s first exhibition and expressed dislike for the artist’s prepossession with form, and for the savage models he chose.  Gauguin’s reply was: 

“Your civilization is your disease; my barbarism is my restoration to health.  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.”

Now I learned from the lips of Le Moine that this man had lived and died in my own valley of Atuona, had perhaps sat on this paepae where we were breakfasting.  Imagination kindled at the thought.  “I will take you to his house,” said Le Moine.

We walked down the road past the governor’s palace until opposite Baufre’s depressing abode, where, several hundred yards back from a stone wall, sunk in the mire of the swamp, had for ten years been Gauguin’s home and studio.  Nothing remained of it but a few faint traces rapidly disappearing beneath the jungle growth.

While we stood in the shade of a cocoanut-palm, gazing at these, we were joined by Baufre, the shaggy and drink-ruined Frenchman, in his torn and dirty overalls.