His health demanded a return to France. He came back, bringing with him pictures--experimental, tentative efforts to reconcile the glow and gloom of the tropics with Pissarro's analysis of paler northern sunlight. He brought back also the germ of thousands of other pictures which he, as yet, could not paint. He brought back with him an idea. IV After seeing the Antilles and returning to Paris, Gauguin was again brought face to face with the problem against which he had already struggled--the problem of his poverty. He had obtained at Martinique the vision of a new world of art, which he knew he was some day destined to realize. But for the present he had neither lodging and studio, nor resources of any kind. He was forced to live on charity. Charity came to him in the shape of Emile Schuffenecker, who had also given up finance for a career as artist. Schuffenecker was not a genius, but he knew ability when he saw it, and opened his doors freely to this needy colleague. It is a pity that Gauguin repaid this generous hospitality of a friend by insulting Schuffenecker as an artist. Gauguin's relations with his friends are amongst the most painful episodes of his life. One is almost inclined to think with Emile Bernard that "the basis of Gauguin's character was a deep-seated egoism," or, with Meier-Graefe, that Gauguin was nothing but a great child. Neither of these views is, however, wholly correct. Gauguin was the son, be it remembered, of a radical journalist and the grandson of a Socialist pamphleteer. Journalism in France is not the same thing as in England. There is scarcely any polite journalism in France. Gauguin himself was always talking, according to Bernard, of art and life needing "the blow of the fist." Paul Déroulède, Edmond Drumont, Henri Rochefort, Octave Mirbeau, Zola, Clemenceau, and other celebrated journalists of the Dreyfus period (the heyday of French journalism) knew quite well what this "blow of the fist" meant, and practiced it upon every opportunity. Moreover, Gauguin was nearly forty, had knocked about the world a great deal, banging himself against many sharp corners in the process, and was face to face with want. It is also possible that he felt bound, for the sake of his wife and children, to make as much money as possible. Finally, he believed in himself as an artist, if no one else did. The world had well hammered into him the hard lesson that one must either hold a high opinion of oneself or become an object of contempt. As he put it himself, "Is it necessary to be modest, or, in other words, an imbecile?"