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 Baufré'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 Baufré, the shaggy and drink-ruined Frenchman, in his torn and dirty overalls.
“This weather is devilish,” said Baufré, 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 Baufré. “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.