src="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@38848@38848-h@images@gauguin_02.jpg" alt="Portrait of Gauguin's mother." title="" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img"/> Portrait of Gauguin's mother.

Aline Marie Gauguin was the daughter of a certain Chazal, of whom we know nothing, and of the then celebrated Socialist pamphleteer and agitator, Flora Tristan.

Flora Tristan was born in 1803 at Lima, Peru. Her father was a Spaniard of noble descent, Mariano Tristan y Moscoso. He served as an officer in the Peruvian Army, and probably took part in the wars of independence which severed Peru from Spain, since we find him and his family later occupying positions of dignity and affluence under the Republic. In 1818 he sent his daughter to school in Paris. She eloped the next year with Chazal and was disowned by her parents. After the birth of her child she separated from her husband and returned to Peru, seeking a reconciliation with her family. But the family had determined to do nothing for the self-willed, impulsive daughter, and she drifted back to Paris, where she attempted to support herself by writing pamphlets of strongly Socialistic tendencies. She became a pioneer of woman's suffrage, of humanitarianism, of the trade-union movement. She toured France making speeches. In 1836 she had the misfortune to meet Chazal again in Paris, who stabbed her in a fit of jealousy and was condemned to twenty years of penal servitude for the offense. A few years later she died in Bordeaux, and the trade-unions, remembering her zeal for their cause and her personal beauty—which had moved them perhaps more than the fervor of her speeches—subscribed the sum necessary to put up a monument.

Such were the parents and the grand-parents of the child who had just been born into the world. The tragic and violent union of Chazal and Flora Tristan serves to explain the man and the artist he later became. In Chazal we find the source of his violence and headstrong irritability; in Flora Tristan we see whence he drew his love of personal and individual liberty, his hatred of moral restraint, his scorn of the bourgeoisie, his Spanish hauteur and stoicism. Half-savage Spanish blood flowed in his veins, a mixture of Arab, Celt and African. Perhaps in his Peruvian descent there were even other currents—currents of that Inca race which the Spaniards had subdued but not conquered. Whatever else destiny held in store for him, it was certain from the beginning that Paul Gauguin could never be wholly assimilated to the intellectual effort of the frivolous and fickle city of Paris.

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.

In the fragmentary note-books he kept in Tahiti he declared that it was during this voyage that he heard from the lips of a ship-mate a story of the latter's life when ship-wrecked among the natives of the Society Islands in the Pacific. The remembrance of that story may have influenced him later in his choice of Tahiti as an ideal residence. At least the appearance of Rio de Janeiro's harbor awakened in his mind fresh enthusiasm for the tropics. The stay at Rio was further signalized by a liaison with an actress, of that eminently casual kind which Gauguin was to experience so often later on. Finally the return voyage brought about another liaison, this time with a Prussian woman, and in defiance of ship's discipline. It was certain that his character—was not of the sort that could be fitted easily into the mold of self-restraint necessary to produce a capable naval officer. At all events, the next thing we hear is that Gauguin quitted the merchant service and enlisted in the French Navy as a common sailor, in February, 1868. Probably by this time his mother had refused to support him, and he was forced into this position through necessity.

The cruiser Jerome Napoleon, on which he found himself, was, to his chagrin, ordered to cruise in northern waters. So instead of seeing the tropics again, Gauguin's new experiences were only of