Altogether in the Marquesas, Gauguin found a great charm and repose. He seems to have rapidly established a great friendship with the natives and to have looked upon himself as being a sort of king. But his health was so bad that he was unable to leave the house and but for one Chinese boy, he lived alone. He even dreamed of abandoning the Marquesas (not because he was weary of the place, but because he knew his strength was small) and seeking a more favorable climate in Spain, where he thought he might be able to paint. Except for the constant trouble with his health, his only difficulty was with the missionaries. With the exception of a few settlers, they were the only whites on the islands. Gauguin had advanced in savagery to such a point as to be unable to bear the presence of white people. He refused to see that the Catholic Missionaries had at least attempted to save the natives from the worse fate that had befallen them under the Protestant Missionaries in Tahiti. The insistence of the Catholics upon monogamy, upon European dress, upon mission schools and religious observances infuriated him. He made a statue of a nude woman and set it up in his garden. The Bishop protested. Gauguin promptly made a caricature in clay of the bishop, with horns on his head like the Devil, and set it up facing the statue. Something of the old Gothic love of the grotesque, something, too, of the typically Parisian desire to "_épater de bourgeois_" remained in him to the last. But this was not all. Gauguin was not the sort of man to end his days in peace. Although de Monfreid had worked devotedly, his position in France was still insecure; Vollard might at any moment refuse to take more pictures to sell. The wound he had received by his failure to impress Paris in 1893 still smarted. He determined to write two articles containing his opinions on art, technique, painting, life and morality, in order to confound the Parisian critics. These articles, entitled "Anecdotes of an Apprentice" and "Before and After," are little more than a series of feverishly jotted notes. Later, with other notes of a similar nature, they were embodied in a large album entitled "Avant et Après," which remains the fullest body of information about Gauguin's life and art we possess. The _Mercure de France_ judged, perhaps rightly, that their tone was too personally violent and refused to print them.