“This weather is devilish,” said Baufre, with a curse.  “It is not as it used to be.  The world goes to the devil.  There were seven hundred people in Atuona when I came here.  They are all dead but two hundred, and there is nobody to help me in my plantation.  If I pay three francs a day, they will not work.  If I pay five francs, they will not work.  Suppose I give them rum?  They will work hard for that, for it means forgetting, but when they drink rum they cannot work at all.”

“But you are a philosopher, and absinthe or rum will cure you,” said Le Moine.

“Mon dieu! I am not a philosopher!” retorted Baufre.  “Of what good is that?  Gauguin was a philosopher, and he is dead and buried on Calvary.  You know how he suffered?  His feet and legs were very bad.  Every day he had to tie them up.  He could not wear shoes, but he painted, and drank absinthe, and injected the morphine into his belly, and painted.

“Sapristi! He was a brave one!  Am I not here over thirty years, and have I met a man like Gauguin?  He never worried.  He painted.  The dealer in Paris sent him five hundred francs a month, and he gave away everything.  He cared only for paint.  And now he is gone. Regardez, here is where his house stood.”

We walked through the matted grass that sketched upon the fertile soil the shape of that house where Gauguin had painted.

It had been raised from the marsh six feet on trunks of trees, and was about forty-five feet long and twenty wide.  The floor was of planks, and one climbed a stairway to reach the veranda.  The frame of the house was of wood, but the sides all of split bamboo, with a row of windows of glass and a roof of cocoanut thatch.  The light entered from the north, and except for a small chamber for sleeping and a closet for provisions, the entire house was a studio, a lofty, breeze-swept hall, the windows high up admitting light, but not the hot sunshine, and the expanse of bamboo filtering the winds in their eternal drift from south to north and north to south.

Below the floor, on the ground, was a room for work in sculpture, in which medium Gauguin took much interest, using clay and wood, the latter both for bas-relief and full relief, Gauguin being hampered, Baufre said, by lack of plasticity in the native clay.  Next to this workroom was a shelter for the horse and cart, for Gauguin had the only wheeled vehicle in the Marquesas.

Baufre exhausted all his rhetoric and used four sheets of foolscap in his endeavor to make me see these surroundings of the artist, whom he evidently considered a great man.

“Five hundred francs a month, mon ami, whether he painted or not!  But he was a worker.  Drunk or sober, he would paint. Oui, I have seen him with a bottle of absinthe in him, and still he would paint.  Early in the morning he was at work at his easel in the studio or under the trees, and every day he painted till the light was gone.  His only use for the cart was to carry him and his easel and chair to scenes he would paint.  He would shoot that accursed morphine into his belly when the pain was too bad, and he would drink wine and talk and paint.