suspect all those around him and think ill of them; and the first of his victims was the luckless Paul...

For Paul remembers, no doubt, that evening when Vincent hurled at his head a glass full of absinthe.

And he remembers the night he woke suddenly, driven by a strange feeling, and saw Vincent standing erect in the pitch darkness beside his bed, staring at his head with a frightening stare; he asked him what was the matter, and the poor fellow retreated at once.

And he remembers the following night too, when he woke in dread, feeling the very same strange feeling, and found him in the darkness as on the night before, and said to him reprovingly:

"Go to your bed, Vincent."

In the morning Gauguin found some paints in his soup, and he rebuked Vincent and scolded him.

In the evening, as he was crossing the square in front of the house on his way to the café, he heard behind him the fall of heavy feet in which he recognized the steps of his friend Vincent; the feet drew nearer and nearer, suspiciously near, and the strange feeling came over him again. He turned round — and there he saw the red-headed madman, an open razor in his hand. He stood where he was, casting at him burning, reproving looks, under which Vincent froze; then he hung his head and turned and hurried away.

Gauguin went on to a hotel, where he took a room to himself, bolted its door, and lay down to sleep.

On the morning of the next day he went out to see his friend, and was appalled to see a knot of people gathered at his door. And behold, one of them said to him:

"What have you done to your friend, sir?"

"I do not know."

"Yes, you do know... He is dead."

Gauguin climbed — the world reeling about him — to the room where he had passed many days with his comrade, to find him stretched on his bed without movement, the people crowded around him and the police at his hand, as though he hung suspended in a void. He touched his friend's body and found it warm, and breathed a sigh of relief. He felt his feet touching the void as hard, firm, solid rock... Then he turned to the chief of police and said:

"Try to wake him gently, sir; and if he asks for me, say that I have gone back to Paris — for the sight of me might cost him his life!"

And he went back to Paris, alive. And from there, on his first voyage to the islands of Tahiti, in 1891... Then he returned to Marseille in his long, strange, gaudily embroidered garments... then Paris... then a short visit to his wife and children... then...

"Where are you bound, Paul Gauguin!"

1895

Paul, hungry and worn out, looked about him and

found in all France not a morsel of palatable bread nor a shaded, restful spot... So he resolved to depart, and the ship carried him to the islands of Tahiti once more — those islands he had loved from the first time. He set out through their fields, painting and making merry, living in their huts and on their shores the life of their people; and the people of those lowlands loved him — "where woman is naked as Eve was, or like her, without shame or bashfulness."

Here he is in the open country before his canvas. Let us draw near him and hear him repeating to himself, criticizing the Impressionist school, which was infatuated with the use of pure, bright, broken and divided colors:

"A meter's expanse of green looks greener than the expanse of a single centimeter, if it is green you wish to express... How does that tree look to you? Is it green? Then use green — the greenest of the colors you have laid on your palette,(1) and that shadow? Does there seem to you a tinge of blue in its folds? Never mind: paint it with the bluest color you can."

For that reason his pictures were decorative panels; and for his naive, simple feeling and his primitive subjects they named him the primitive artist.

Sickness added to his torment, for leprosy struck him, and he withdrew from the world — except for a half-naked wife whom he took as his partner from among the girls of those islands, brilliant of color, gay, dancing — islands whose people he stood beside against the European colonizers and the missionary missions. He built himself a small house like the houses of the first inhabitants, eating of their food and their fruit, until the hand of death knocked at his door and he opened it to her smiling, in his forty-eighth year — for the brides to bear him away to where the processions of Seurat and Van Gogh had gone before him.

But his mortal body fell prey into the hands of the Europeans, who feted it and made ceremony over it, and carried it on their shoulders to a deserted, solitary corner among graves whose neighborhood I do not think he rests easy in — the graves of the missionary missions!

(1) We mean Palette — on the pattern of mindadah and minfadah (mif'alah).