To these people came Paul Gauguin, unwitting of the tragedy of their history. It is true that he was weary of Europe and had set out with the aim he had cherished since the Martinique days--to be the first painter of the tropics. But it is probable that he chose Tahiti at hazard, because he believed that here was a country where one could live for almost nothing. It must always be remembered that Gauguin had no private means and that his pictures, like all works in advance of their time, did not sell. Cezanne, Degas, could afford not to sell their pictures because they had other resources. But Gauguin was forced to find some way of existing while producing pictures that, as he knew well, it would take the public some time to accept. In a letter to de Monfreid he stated his system: "From the beginning, I knew that this would be a life from day to day; so, logically, I habituated myself to it. Instead of losing my strength in work and worry for the moment, I put all my strength into the day--like the wrestler who does not employ his body except in the moment of wrestling. When I lie down in the evening I say to myself: One more day is gained, perhaps to-morrow I shall be dead. In my work as a painter, ditto--I do not trouble about anything, but each day for itself--at the end of a certain time, this covers a considerable extent of surface. If men would not waste their time in disconnected struggles and labors! Every day a link. That is the great point." Such was the frame of mind in which Gauguin went to Tahiti. What he found there was not the "Pays de Cocaigne" he probably expected. The Gods do not give their gifts in this fashion. Gauguin asked much from Tahiti and much was given. But he asked for material comfort and was offered instead spiritual salvation. In Tahiti, Paul Gauguin found, at last, his soul; and the work that he achieved there, though it brought him in no material fortune, was to stand and speak to later ages, its own terrible parable to all men. II On the night of the eighth of June 1891, after sixty-three days of voyaging, Gauguin at last arrived at Papeete, the capital of Tahiti. He was at the time suffering from bronchitis, contracted during the last winter in Paris, and within a few days of his arrival was obliged to take to his bed. He was now within a few days of his forty-third birthday. Although possessed of a normally strong constitution, fortified by the open-air existence of his youth and by various athletic exercises, such as boxing, fencing and swimming, of which he was very fond, his health, when he reached Tahiti, became immediately worse. This was largely due to his constant over-indulgence in tobacco and partly also to the privations which he had endured throughout his five years' struggle for livelihood.