OF THE SOUTH SEAS 89 



ready settled for me by the amiable officials and officers 

 on the rue de Rivoh. I had been warned against the 

 Cercle Bougainville by staid pensioners as being the 

 resort of commoners and worse, of British and Ameri- 

 can ruffians, of French vulgarians, and of Chinese smug- 

 glers. 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 '11 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 aris- 

 tocratic bureaucrats was of a piece with their philosophy 

 and manners, hollow, hypocritical, and calculated to 

 deny me the only real human companionship I could en- 

 dure. From about eleven to one o'clock and from five 

 until seven, and in the evening's, the Cercle Bougainville 

 held more interesting and merry white skins than the 

 remainder of Tahiti. Merchants and managers of en- 

 terprises and shops, skippers of the schooners that comb 

 the Dangerous Archipelago and the dark Marquesas 

 for pearl and shell and copra, vanilla- and pearl-buyers, 

 planters, and lesser bureaucrats, idlers or retired ad- 

 venturers living in Tahiti, and tourists made the club 

 for a few hours a day a polyglot exchange of current 

 topics between man and man, a place of initiation and of 

 judgment of business deals, a precious refuge against 

 smug bores and a sanctuary for refreshment of body -and 



