betrayed the consul's belief in the préposé's sinister ancestry and
in eternal punishment. No entente cordiale could ever be cemented
after that lingual blast.

The consuls all had honorary memberships in the Cercle Militaire,
and none of them entered the Cercle Bougainville, it not being de
rigueur. I had a carte d'invite personelle to that club, and there
I went with roused curiosity to hear the other sides of questions
already settled for me by the amiable officials and officers on the
rue de Rivoli. I had been warned against the Cercle Bougainville
by staid pensioners as being the resort of commoners and worse, of
British and American ruffians, of French vulgarians, and of Chinese
smugglers. This advice made a seductive advertisement of the club to
me, anxious to know everything real and unveiled about the life here,
and to find a contrast to the ennui of the official temple.

A consul said to me: "Look out for some of those gamblers in
that Bougainville joint! They'll skin you alive. They drink like
conger-eels."

M. Leboucher, my fellow-passenger on the Noa-Noa, sent me the card to
the Jacobin resort, and I got in the habit of going there just before
the meat breakfast and before dinner. I found that the warning of
the aristocratic bureaucrats was of a piece with their philosophy and
manners, hollow, hypocritical, and calculated to deny me the only real
human companionship I could endure. From about eleven to one o'clock
and from five until seven, and in the evenings, the Cercle Bougainville
held more interesting and merry white skins than the remainder of
Tahiti. Merchants and managers of enterprises and shops, skippers
of the schooners that comb the Dangerous Archipelago and the dark