Father David, seeing me with Mademoiselle Narbonne one day, spoke of her to me.
“We have hoped all along that Jean Narbonne’s daughter would remain with us,” he said, inquisitively. “But the sacred heart of Jesus does not call every one. The church leaves all free to choose a vocation of service to God or not. We know she can find happiness only with the nuns, for there is only wickedness outside the convent. Barbe is now a woman, and unfortunately too much like her mother, who was a Magdalen. She cannot marry a native because she cannot live in the brush. What white can she select. There is the governor and Bauda and Le Brunnec, all bad Catholics, and who else?”
“There is Lutz, the big trader at Tahauku,” I said.
“Lutz? No, no! He is a German, an enemy of France, and he is a Protestant, and, besides, he has had his own woman fourteen years. He is not married to her, but God knows even the devil could not excuse putting away such an old companion. What would he want of her but her money?”
“He has some property himself.”
“No, no! It would be impossible. He is a German, a heretic, and I tell you he has that Tahitian woman ever since he has been here. Some day he will return to Germany, the Germany of Martin Luther, and leave behind any woman here. These Europeans who come here, except the Fathers, have no consciences. When they have made a little fortune, unless they are like Guillitoue, or Hemeury François, who are more Canaque than the Canaques, they go back to marry innocent and unsuspecting women.”
I cannot imagine why I mentioned Lutz. I had never seen him with Mademoiselle Narbonne, and she had not sounded his name. Of course, he was the only possibly eligible man other than the whites already enumerated. However, such thoughts did not come by chance, for the apostolic vicar’s solicitude against him was matched by the boisterous roarings of Commissaire Bauda, the reincarnated musketeer. Over a Doctor Funk at his beach house, my repeating of what Father David had said brought from him an oath and a spluttering:
“Sacré cochon! That Lutz will go too far on French territory. He has the best lands, most of the trade, and is the only one who can sell liquor. Do we not all pay tribute to him? Now, me, I have not thought of marrying, but if that daughter of a French corporal should look for a suitable mate, who but Bauda? I am a soldier, a veteran of wars in Africa, I have the medal General Devinne pinned here,”—he slapped his chest,—“and I am a Frenchman. I could not agree to live here, but why not for her a house in Marseilles where there are so many dark people of our colonies? I could be there, say half the year, and the rest of it in Paris. I would defend her against the world, and in turn, would take my pleasure in the capital. I do not seek it, but rather than the robber, Lutz, should take the money to Germany, as I know he wants to do, it might, perhaps, be arranged. And, pire alors! I would soon send to the devil all those notions the church has put in her little head. A drop of absinthe, mon vieux? Bauda has his eyes on Lutz.”
I had met Herr Lutz each time that I had gone to his store at Tahauku, but our social relations began when he sent me, by his cook, a Tongan, a formal invitation to dinner. Like the young governor, this European merchant, as often as the small voice of his civilization spoke to him, cultivated the customs of his bourgeois class in order to reassure himself of his retaining them. I have the letter before me:
Tahauka, le 11 avril.