In Papeete there were two social clubs, the Cercle Bougainville and the Cercle Militaire. Even in Papeete, which has not half as many people as work in a certain building in New York, there is a bureaucracy, and the Cercle Militaire, in a park near the executive mansion on the rue de Rivoli, is its arcanum. Only members of the Government may belong, and a few others whose proposals must be stamped by the political powers. There is a garden, with a small library, but not many read in this climate, and the atmosphere of the Cercle Militaire was tedious. The governor himself and the black procureur de la Republique, born in Martinique, the secretary-general, naval officers, and the file of the upper office-holders frequent the shade of the mangos and the palms, but themselves confessed it deadly dull there. Bureaucracy is ever mediocre, ever jealous, and in Papeete the feuds among the whites were as bitter as in a monastery or convent. Every man crouched to leap over his fellow, if not by position, at least by acclaim. None dared to discuss political affairs openly, but nothing else was talked of. It was a round of whispered charges and recriminations and audible compliments. A few jolly chaps, doctors or naval lieutenants, passed the bottle and laughed at the others.
Every now and then a new governor supplanted the incumbent, who returned to France, and a few of the chiefer officials were changed; but the most of them were Tahitian French by birth or long residence. Republics are wretched managers of colonies, and monarchies brutal exploiters of subject peoples. Politics controlled in the South Seas, as in the Philippines, India, and Egypt. Precedence at public gatherings often caused hatreds. The procureur was second in rank here, the governor, of course, first, the secretary-general third, and the attorney-general fourth. When the secretary-general was not at functions, the wife of the governor must be handed in to dinner and dances by the negro procureur. This angered the British and American consuls and merchants, and the French inferior to him in social status, although the Martinique statesman was better educated and more cultivated in manners than they.
The indolence of mind and body that few escape in this soft, delicious air, the autocracy of the governing at such a distance from France, and the calls of Paris for the humble taxes of the Tahitians, robbed the island of any but the most pressing melioration. The business of government in these archipelagoes was bizarre comedy-drama, with Tartarins at the front of the stage, and a cursing or slumbrous audience.
Count Polonsky, a Russian-born Frenchman, appeared in court to answer to the charge of letting his automobile engine run when no one was in the car. He was fined a franc, which he would take from his pocket then and there, but must wait many days to pay, until circumlocution had its round, six weeks after the engine had been at fault. I was assessed two sous duty on a tooth-brush. I reached for the coins.
“Mais, non” said the préposé de le douane, “pas maintenant. No hurry. We will inform you by post.”
These officials had pleasing manners, as do almost all Frenchmen, and though they uttered many sacrés against the home Government and that of these islands, they were fiercely chauvinistic toward foreigners, as are all nationals abroad where jingoism partakes of self-aggrandizement. The American consul, a new appointee, addressed the customs clerk in his only tongue, Iowan, and received no response. I spoke to him in French, and the préposé replied in mixed French and English, out of compliment to me. The consul was enraged, considering himself and the American eagle affronted. I interposed, but the customs-man answered coldly in English:
“This is a French possession, and French is the language, or Tahitian. I speak both. Why don’t you? You are supposedly an educated man.”
The Stars and Stripes were unfolded in a breeze of hot words that betrayed the consul’s belief in the préposé’s sinister ancestry and in eternal punishment. No entente cordiale could ever be cemented after that lingual blast.
The consuls all had honorary memberships in the Cercle Militaire, and none of them entered the Cercle Bougainville, it not being de rigueur. I had a carte d’invite personelle to that club, and there I went with roused curiosity to hear the other sides of questions already settled for me by the amiable officials and officers on the rue de Rivoli. I had been warned against the Cercle Bougainville by staid pensioners as being the resort of commoners and worse, of British and American ruffians, of French vulgarians, and of Chinese smugglers. This advice made a seductive advertisement of the club to me, anxious to know everything real and unveiled about the life here, and to find a contrast to the ennui of the official temple.
A consul said to me: “Look out for some of those gamblers in that Bougainville joint! They’ll skin you alive. They drink like conger-eels.”