The other old score that he had to wipe out was with the French colonial administration. In Tahiti, he had fought the governor, the law courts, and the gendarmes. Here it was the customs officials who roused his wrath. Two American ships had recently visited the island and a certain amount of goods had been sold to the natives, through the connivance of the gendarmes, without paying tax. Gauguin immediately wrote a letter on the subject to the Administration, stating the facts as he understood them and protesting, on behalf of the natives, against the bribery and corruption of the Customs in this instance. The only reply made was a notice from the law courts that the Administration intended to take steps against him for the dissemination of an untrue statement. Gauguin appeared in court, where he was promptly condemned to prison for three months and to a fine of a thousand francs. It was ruin, but Gauguin determined to appeal. The tribunal was irregularly constituted and his facts had been proven to be in part, at least, true. He was sure of winning his case, but an appeal necessitated a return to Tahiti and the costs of an attorney, and his capital was again running low. He wrote to de Montfreid, begging him to find a buyer for three pictures, at the price of fifteen hundred francs; he sent off ten more pictures to Vollard. Then he prepared to make his appeal. Death surprised him suddenly and Paul Gauguin's appeal will never be heard in this world. A letter from the only white man, the Protestant minister Vernier, who knew him, leaves no doubt on the subject of the cause of Gauguin's death. It was not the eczema of the legs, nor leprosy, as some have hinted, nor another dose of arsenic, nor syphilis, that ended his life; it was a simple syncope of the heart. His energy, with which he had kept up for so many years the struggle with the world and out of which he had drawn so many beautiful pictures, was worn out. The machine slackened and stopped. Paul Gauguin died on the 6th of May, 1903. A few days before his death he had written his last letter to Charles Morice, the words of which stir one like a trumpet.