the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt ten)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

It was a colourful party of eight that sunny breezy day in May. The artists Roderic O’Conor, Armand Séguin and Émile Jourdan brought their mistresses; Gauguin brought Annah and Taoa, her little monkey. A lovely long walk along the beach took them to the mossy bridge of roughly dressed stone connecting the mainland to the Ville Close, the medieval fortified island in the middle of the harbour. In Pont-Aven, where dressing up was a competitive game, the noisy group would not have turned a head, but in Concarneau’s stolid fishing community, exotic apparitions were not appreciated. A group of boys started following them, laughing, pointing and making rude gestures and obscene remarks. The party ignored them until a boy picked up a stone and threw it at them. Séguin went over to remonstrate; he pulled the boy’s ear. At a nearby café table a group of about fifteen men witnessed the incident. The group included the boy’s father. Rising to their feet with unmistakeable purpose, they made a rush towards the artists. The drumroll of their wooden clogs on the cobbles sent a white flurry of gulls screaming into the air. Annah’s parrot beat her wings in fear and panic. Séguin ran away from the advancing mob and jumped fully clothed into the harbour. Gauguin had not forgotten his boxing skills. With one blow he sent an attacker flying into the harbour. This was exciting. He dispatched several more into the water. And then he fell. Agony shot up his leg. It was impossible to get up. The thugs thundered towards his prone body to give him a kicking. He thought he must have fallen into a hole but in fact what had happened was that one of his assailants’ wooden clogs had shattered his shinbone and splintered several small bones in his ankle. They continued to kick him as he lay there. He put his arms up to shelter his head. All he could hear was stamping on the cobbles like pistol shots. The arrival of the gendarmes prevented Gauguin being kicked to death. He was lifted insensible on to a cart and taken back to Pont-Aven. The shinbone was sticking out of his leg through the skin. In the hospital they gave him morphine and set the leg as best they could.

He moved from the hospital to the Pension Gloanec as soon as was feasible. Through the months of August and September Gauguin lay there in bed in terrible pain, in a haze dulled by morphine. Taoa, the little monkey, cheered him; she was his playmate, companion and alter ego, and had even used to follow Gauguin into the water when he went swimming. But she ate the white flower of a yucca plant, poisonous to her kind, and she died. Soon after Taoa’s death, Annah left for Paris.