There, one day, promenading upon the beach with the persistent mulatto model at his side, he was jeered at by some sailors. In a moment, all his ridiculous artifices and carefully-studied poses slipped from him. He was again a savage, fighting for the right to exist in his own way. He attacked the sailors but they were too many for him and one, slipping behind him, launched a well-aimed kick and broke his leg at the shin. The mulatto fled, took a train to Paris, entered the empty studio, seized whatever she could lay her hands on and vanished. As for Gauguin, he lay on a stretcher, uttering not a groan but stoically rolling and smoking a cigarette. IV Little by little there had been dawning in his mind a vague understanding; and now, as he lay on his bed in the inn at Pont-Aven, this understanding became a conviction. He saw and understood at last what it was that he had tried to accomplish and why he had failed. He knew now what his art had been; a great protest, an external manifestation of the inner revolt that had gone on in his soul. What he had fought against was the cunning extortion, the moral degradation, the bargaining hypocrisy, of nineteenth century Europe. And nineteenth century Europe had risen against him, was casting him out, was destroying him. He must either submit or declare war, for the sake of his life, his art, his soul. Among the people of Tahiti, labeled contemptuously "savages" by the very folk who had hampered the development of his art at every opportunity, among these savages he knew that he had found honor, courage, moral dignity, and disinterested kindness as he had found them nowhere else. Among these oppressed and exploited savages, there still survived vestiges of a civilization in which art had its proper place in the scheme of things, as a means to fuller and more joyous life and as a door opening upon the mysteries of that beyond which neither scientists nor theologians could ever pierce. Among these savages he had found a dark subterranean hatred of the new civilization, which they knew to be destroying them; and now he looked and saw the same hatred in his own soul. On September 20, 1894, he wrote to Daniel de Monfreid:-- "As you say, I have not given any news of myself recently and every one is complaining. The reason is, you see, that I have lost all my strength through suffering, above all at night, which I frequently pass without any sleep. And into the bargain naturally I have done nothing this infernal month except spend money. For the rest, I have made a fixed resolve to go back and live always in Oceania and shall return to Paris in December in order to occupy myself exclusively in selling all my bazar at no matter what price. If I succeed I shall leave as soon as possible in February. I can then finish my days without care for the morrow and without the external struggle against fools--Farewell to painting, except as a means of distraction. My house will be in sculptured wood."