Irkutsk! I was better off when I was on the Merrimac fighting the
Monitor, or with Mosby, the guerilla, than I am in this accursed
island. I think a man is mad who can leave Tahiti and stays here. I
wish I could go away. I would like to die elsewhere. I am eighty years
old, I starve here, and I sleep in a chicken-coop in the suburbs."

"You are lodged exactly as was Charlie Stoddard, who wrote 'South
Sea Idylls,'" I interposed.

"They have lied always, those writers about Tahiti," said Ivan
Stroganoff. "Melville, Loti, Moerenhout, Pallander, your Stevenson,--I
don't know that Stoddard,--all are meretricious, with their pomp of
words and no truth. I have comparisons to make with other nations. I
am more than sixty years a traveler, and I am here seventeen years
without cessation, in hell all the time."

"You Russians always like the French. How about their achievements
here?" I questioned, hoping to lift his shade of melancholy.

"The French?" he repeated. "They are brigands and weak governors. They
have been in Tahiti four generations. Do you want to know how they
got hold here? A monarchy, a foolish Louis, sent a marine savant
and soldier named Dumont D'Urville to the South Seas with the casual
orders:

"'D'apprivoiser les hommes, et de rendre les femmes un peu plus
sauvages;' to tame the men and make the women a little more savage. The
French did both, and took all of this part of the world they could
find unseized by Europe, and tamable, at not too great a shedding
of French blood. They said that it was their duty to restore Temoana