Paris has been for a century the most fickle and cruel city in the world. Since her spoiled darling Napoleon fell, there has been no one to whom she is willing to grant her favors for more than a day. There are a few exceptions to this rule. Hugo, because he lived in exile; Balzac, because he, too, was a hermit, continually pestered by his creditors; and of recent years Verlaine, because he haunted the lowest cafés, the vilest dens, and only emerged from these to go into a hospital or a prison. Such men may be the idols of Paris. For the rest, Paris is willing only to think of her children as sons for a day. Gauguin returned, picturing a complete conquest of Paris. But he had already enjoyed the brief hour of glory that was to be his. Had he but managed his affairs more wisely, he might, on the strength of the sensation his pictures had created in Denmark and subsequently in Sweden, Norway, and Germany, have now concluded with a picture-dealer an arrangement enabling him to obtain a small fixed sum every year for his work. But Gauguin demanded all or nothing! And, as was the case before with his mother and her Peruvian relatives, the result was nothing. He decided to give a general exhibition of his entire Tahitian work, forty-four pictures and two pieces of sculpture. Durand-Ruel gave him a gallery and Charles Morice, chief of the young symbolists whom Gauguin had met after the Volpini show, wrote a preface to the catalog, which probably only served to mystify the public still further. For the effect of the exhibition on public and press was to produce frank bewilderment. Of the forty-four pictures exhibited, thirty-three remained unsold. What misled visitors more than anything else were the titles that Gauguin had seen fit to attach to his pictures. These titles were in the Tahitian language. Every one immediately supposed that in order to understand the pictures, it was necessary to be expert in the history, the folk-lore, the manners and customs of Tahiti. Naturally therefore the pictures seemed to be mere archæological and ethnological puzzles, only to be read by those possessing the key. Gauguin, of course, had intended something else. Just as he had used Brittany to suggest the somber passion and suffering of Christ, so he had used Tahiti to suggest the primal innocence, the enigmatic mystery of life as it was lived in Eden and in the days of man's awakening--in that Golden Age dreamed by every great poet and every great painter. But it was useless for him to try to explain that Tahiti had merely given him material out of which his imagination had evolved pictures.