Gauguin, of course, had intended something else. Just as he had used Brittany to suggest the somber passion and suffering of Christ, so he had used Tahiti to suggest the primal innocence, the enigmatic mystery of life as it was lived in Eden and in the days of man's awakening—in that Golden Age dreamed by every great poet and every great painter. But it was useless for him to try to explain that Tahiti had merely given him material out of which his imagination had evolved pictures.
Morice pictures him standing at the exhibition, day after day, and listening with perfect composure to the stupid remarks and laughter of the crowd. It was, as he later said of himself, the torture of the Indian who smiles at the stake. Only Degas came and understood. To him on the last day of the exhibit, Gauguin said: "Monsieur Degas, you have forgotten your cane," and taking down a cane he himself had sculptured handed it to the astonished painter.
The bitterness of sheer starvation would assuredly have been his, had not fortune, with sly mockery and with perhaps a desire to save Gauguin for better things, sent him means of salvation. A brother of his father died in Orleans, well-to-do and a bachelor. From his estate, Gauguin inherited thirteen thousand francs.
The exhibition had been a mistake, but his next move was sheer folly. Instead of reflecting calmly upon his situation, he rented a studio and determined to make one more attempt to impress and startle Paris. Morice admits that this was done at the insistence of his so-called friends. If this was the case Gauguin would have done well had he uttered the well-known prayer, "Deliver me from my friends!" For Morice, even, admitted later that it was, under the circumstances, a mistake.
About Gauguin's studio and his life at this period the legends have grown with the years. It is undoubtedly a fact that his walls were colored pale yellow, and his windows painted with Tahitian subjects in imitation of stained glass (these same windows were, by the way, on exhibition at a dealer's in Paris a few years ago). It is true that his rooms were decorated with trophies, boomerangs, wooden clubs, spears. It is true that he kept a monkey and a model, a mulatto woman who is said to have come from Java and who was certainly more of a trial to him than anything else. It is true also that he wore a strange costume, consisting of a long blue riding coat with pearl buttons, a blue waistcoat embroidered yellow, brown pantaloons, and a gray slouch hat with a blue ribbon. But the importance of these and of similar details is very slight. Gauguin has been dead now for some years and it is time that the recollection of these pitiable attempts to attract the attention of heedless Paris were dead also and forgotten.
Despite this parade of self-satisfied vanity, Gauguin found himself ill-at-ease. The facile adulation of the symbolists, who frequented the tea-parties he gave at his studio, could not hold him. He wandered off to Bruges, where he remained rapt with admiration before Memling and astounded, half-overwhelmed by the brutal energy of Rubens. He lost interest in the new pupils who offered themselves, Seguin and O'Connor. After a vain attempt to get a post from the Government as a resident in Oceania, he again drifted back to Pont-Aven.
There, one day, promenading upon the beach with the persistent mulatto model at his side, he was jeered at by some sailors. In a moment, all his ridiculous artifices and carefully-studied poses slipped from him. He was again a savage, fighting for the right to exist in his own way. He attacked the sailors but they were too many for him and one, slipping behind him, launched a well-aimed kick and broke his leg at the shin.
The mulatto fled, took a train to Paris, entered the empty studio, seized whatever she could lay her hands on and vanished. As for Gauguin, he lay on a stretcher, uttering not a groan but stoically rolling and smoking a cigarette.
IV