upon the fertile
soil the shape of that house where Gauguin had painted.

It had been raised from the marsh six feet on trunks of trees, and
was about forty-five feet long and twenty wide. The floor was of
planks, and one climbed a stairway to reach the veranda. The frame
of the house was of wood, but the sides all of split bamboo, with a
row of windows of glass and a roof of cocoanut thatch. The light
entered from the north, and except for a small chamber for sleeping
and a closet for provisions, the entire house was a studio, a lofty,
breeze-swept hall, the windows high up admitting light, but not the
hot sunshine, and the expanse of bamboo filtering the winds in their
eternal drift from south to north and north to south.

Below the floor, on the ground, was a room for work in sculpture, in
which medium Gauguin took much interest, using clay and wood, the
latter both for bas-relief and full relief, Gauguin being hampered,
Baufre said, by lack of plasticity in the native clay. Next to this
workroom was a shelter for the horse and cart, for Gauguin had the
only wheeled vehicle in the Marquesas.

Baufre exhausted all his rhetoric and used four sheets of foolscap
in his endeavor to make me see these surroundings of the artist,
whom he evidently considered a great man.

"Five hundred francs a month, _mon ami_, whether he painted or not!
But he was a worker. Drunk or sober, he would paint. _Oui_, I have
seen him with a bottle of absinthe in him, and still he would paint.
Early in the morning he was at work at his easel in the studio or
under the trees, and every day he painted till the light was gone.
His only use for the cart was to carry him and his easel and chair
to scenes he would paint. He would shoot that accursed morphine into
his belly when the pain was too bad, and he would drink wine and
talk and paint.

"He had no wife or woman, but he took one in the way of the white
man here now and then. He lived alone, save for a half-Chinese boy
who cooked and cleaned for him. He never said he was sick. There was
no doctor on this island, for the government was then at Nuka-hiva,
and he had no time to go there. He suffered terribly, but he never
complained. 'Life is short,' he would say, 'and there is not long to
paint.'

"He would not talk politics, but after the light was gone he would
sit at the organ in his studio and make one cry with his music. When
at home he wore only a _pareu_, but he would put on trousers