“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.’