when he
went out. He worked and drank and injected his morphine, and one
morning when the boy came he found him dead, and he was smiling.

"The government hated him because he cursed it for not letting the
natives keep their customs. The church hated him because he
ridiculed it. Still, they buried him in the Catholic cemetery. I
went with the body, and four Marquesans carried it up the trail.

"The government sold his house to Gedge, and Gedge sold it to a
native, who tore it down for the materials. It was of no use to any
one, for it was built for an artist.

"_Vous savez; mon garcon_, I am not acquainted with pictures, and
have never seen any but his, but I felt that they were good. They
made one feel the sun. There was in them the soul of these islands.
And you know that Polonaise, with the one eye-glass, that lives in
Papeite, that Krajewsky? _Eh bien!_ he was here to buy these stone
images of gods, and he said that in Paris they were paying tens of
thousands of francs for those things of Gauguin's he would have
given me for the asking. Ah well! he had the head and he was a
philosopher, but he lies up there in Calvary."

"Perhaps," said Le Moine.

"_Mon ami_," said the shaggy man, "I go to church, and you and I and
Gauguin are the same kind of Catholic. We don't do what we pray for.
That man was smarter than you or me, and the good God will forgive
him whatever he did. He paid everybody, and Chassognal of Papeite
found seven hundred francs in a book where he had carelessly laid it.
If he drank, he shared it, and he paid his women."

"He was an atheist," persisted Le Moine.

"Atheist!" echoed Baufre. "He believed in making beautiful pictures,
and he was not afraid of God or of the mission. How do you know what
God likes? Mathieu Scallamera built the church here and the mission
houses, and he is dead, and all his family are lepers. Did God do
that? _Non! Non!_ You and I know nothing about that. You like to
drink. Your woman is tattooed, and we are both men and bad. Come and
have a drink?"

We left him beside the road and walked slowly beneath the arch of
trees toward the mountain whose summit was crowned by the white
cross of Calvary graveyard.

"He drank too much, he took morphine, he was mortally ill, and yet
he painted. Those chaps who have to have leisure and sandal-wood
censors might learn from that man," said Le Moine. "He was a pagan
and he saw nature with the eyes of a pagan god, and he painted it