The government house was set half a mile farther on in the narrowing ravine, and on the way we passed a desolate dwelling, squalid, set in the marsh, its battered verandas and open doors disclosing a wretched mingling of native bareness with poverty-stricken European fittings.  On the tottering veranda sat a ragged Frenchman, bearded and shaggy-haired, and beside him three girls as blonde as German Maedchens.  Their white delicate faces and blue eyes, in such surroundings, struck one like a blow.  The eldest was a girl of eighteen years, melancholy, though pretty, wearing like the others a dirty gown and no shoes or stockings.  The man was in soiled overalls, and reeling drunk.

“That is Baufre,” said Ducat.  “He is always drunk.  He married the daughter of an Irish trader, a former officer in the British Indian Light Cavalry.  Baufre was a sous-officier in the French forces here.  There is no native blood in those girls.  What will become of them, I wonder?”

A few hundred yards further on was the palace.  It was a wooden house of four or five rooms, with an ample veranda, surrounded by an acre of ground fenced in.  The sward was the brilliantly green, luxuriant wild growth that in these islands covers every foot of earth surface.  Cocoanuts and mango-trees rose from this volunteer lawn, and under them a dozen rosebushes, thick with excessively fragrant bloom.  Pineapples grew against the palings, and a bed of lettuce flourished in the rear beside a tiny pharmacy, a kitchen, and a shelter for servants.

On the spontaneous verdure before the veranda three score Marquesans stood or squatted, the men in shirts and overalls and the women in tunics.  Their skins, not brown nor red nor yellow, but tawny like that of the white man deeply tanned by the sun, reminded me again that these people may trace back their ancestry to the Caucasian cradle.  The hair of the women was adorned with gay flowers or the leaves of the false coffee bush.  Their single garments of gorgeous colors clung to their straight, rounded bodies, their dark eyes were soft and full of light as the eyes of deer, and their features, clean-cut and severe, were of classic lines.

The men, tall and massive, seemed awkwardly constricted in ill-fitting, blue cotton overalls such as American laborers wear over street-clothes.  Their huge bodies seemed about to break through the flimsy bindings, and the carriage of their striking heads made the garments ridiculous.  Most of them had fairly regular features on a large scale, their mouths wide, and their lips full and sensual.  They wore no hats or ornaments, though it has ever been the custom of all Polynesians to put flowers and wreaths upon their heads.

Men and women were waiting with a kind of apathetic resignation; melancholy and unresisting despair seemed the only spirit left to them.

On the veranda with the governor and Bauda were several whites, one a French woman to whom we were presented.  Madame Bapp, fat and red-faced, in a tight silk gown over corsets, was twice the size of her husband, a dapper, small man with huge mustaches, a paper collar to his ears, and a fiery, red-velvet cravat.