Gauguin appeared to the smaller fry of Symbolism as a sort of hero. Here was a man whose revolt was something not fictitious. He had definitely broken away from his own commercial surroundings. He had defiantly ruptured his own family ties. He had abolished Impressionist science and had sought to restore art to its primitive condition, revealing in the process the inexhaustible strength and vitality of peasant and popular art. His appearance amongst them, in a sailor's jersey, a sailor cap, sailor's trousers, and carved wooden shoes, excited a sensation. He became to the facile crowd of hero-worshipers and hangers-on, a sort of symbol. Some critics have stated that Gauguin's head was turned by this adulation, but in reality, under a new veneer of affectation, he remained what he had always been. No man was less fitted for living in the midst of cultivated society than he. For a time, during that strange epoch of his financial career, he had indeed become, to outward seeming, largely an European; but this was merely on the surface and had completely vanished in the course of his later vagabondage. An invincible shyness and indisposition to reveal himself to others were in him, masked by an appearance of sullen reserve and discourtesy. This shyness disappeared when he was with children, peasants, or natives. But to every one else Gauguin attempted to be as rude as possible, in order to keep them at a distance. And, generally, he succeeded. It is small wonder then that Schuffenecker shortly found his guest again intolerable, and that Gauguin had to seek out a more modest lodging. Schuffenecker is scarcely to be pitied. He seems never to have realized that Gauguin was the sort of man whom it was worth while trying to love and understand. In losing Gauguin, he lost the one thing that was ever likely to bring him fame, the reputation which his studio had already acquired in the eyes of certain amateurs, as housing Gauguin's collection of pictures and sculptures by himself, by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Odilon Redon. Gauguin shortly found a better friend perhaps the only real friend he ever had--who was willing to give him the use of a studio. This was Daniel de Monfreid, who had, incidentally, under the name George Daniel taken part in the Volpini exhibition. It is worthy of note that what brought them together was not a community of taste in matters of art, but a common love of the sea.