II
The earliest adventures of the future painter combined the peculiar strands of tragedy, romance and savagery which were to recur so often in his later life. In December, 1851, the makeshift Republic came to an end and Louis Napoleon, by an easy coup d'état, restored the Empire. Clovis Gauguin found himself ruined with the suspension of the Liberal paper for which he wrote. There was only one hope remaining: that Flora Tristan's relations in Lima might do something for Paul and his sister Marie. So the family set out for Peru. On the way, during the terrible passage through the Straits of Magellan, Clovis Gauguin was seized with heart failure and died. His body was taken ashore and buried at Port Famine, or Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in the world, in Chile.
The mother and her two orphaned children were received with kindness by the head of the family, Flora Tristan's uncle, Don Pio Tristan y Moscoso. Concerning this personage Gauguin himself told many anecdotes in later years. Probably most of these were inexact to the point of being fable pure and simple. We must remember that Gauguin at this time was scarcely four years of age. We know that the family were wealthy nobles, of high social standing, who lived in the old Castillian manner of luxury and indolence. From such surroundings Gauguin doubtless derived much of the "hidalgo manner" that distinguished him throughout life—a blend of haughtiness, reserve and egoism, masking often a real shyness before people. And here he saw, also for the first time, works of art produced by a non-European civilization: ceramics, jewelry, fabrics of Inca origin. The remembrance of these specimens of savage, primitive art undoubtedly influenced his mind in later years.
Gauguin's stay in Lima did not last long. Four years later his paternal grandfather died in France, and his mother returned to that country in order to obtain her share of his estate, which proved to be only a small sum.
In later years, the painter believed, or affected to believe, that if his mother had remained in Peru and had neglected her relations in France she would have been left heiress to Don Pio Tristan's property. It is probable that Gauguin was here merely romancing, as he often did, when desiring to mystify and startle people about his life. It is an enchanting but fruitless speculation to wonder what course the boy's mind might have taken had it been subjected for a few more years to the influence of Peruvian life. Peru undoubtedly gave him a love for the tropics, for exotic, out-of-the-way, old-fashioned places, unspoiled by the nineteenth century. Unconsciously many of the traits that made his character so little comprehensible to the Frenchmen of his day were planted in him during these years.
France was now to give him something different. He was to be educated, or rather to receive what passed for an education. He remained at a seminary at Orleans till the age of seventeen, hating his studies, becoming more and more intractable and unteachable. This seminary, as all such institutions in France at the time, was conducted by Jesuit priests.
In later days he declared that all he had learned from the years that he had spent at the seminary were a hatred of hypocrisy, false virtue and spying. And with malicious irony he said: "And I also learnt there a little of that spirit of Jesuit casuistry, which is a force not to be despised in the struggle with other people."
His sole ambition was to escape, to get to sea again, to make voyages to the tropics. His mother dreamed of placing him as a cadet in the navy, but he ignominiously failed to pass the necessary examination. He was therefore placed in the merchant marine. This decision of his mother he regretted bitterly to the end of his life.
In 1865 he embarked aboard the Luzitano, a cargo boat, on a voyage from Havre to Rio de Janeiro. His grade aboard this ship was that of a pilot's apprentice.
Of this voyage, which enabled him to see again the tropics, Gauguin retained in later years important memories.