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