Passion Fruit

Miles and miles of coral reef, foam-dashed, and flown about by gulls—beyond the reef the hills and highlands of Paradise engraved on a sky of azure; a tall white lighthouse like a ghost in the smoky blue of the sea.

That is New Caledonia as you see it coming up from Sydney or Brisbane, and the lighthouse marks the entry to the harbor of Noumea.

For long years France exported to this Paradise all the evil passions of man done up in the form of convicts; and though the exportation has stopped, though the only prisoners now are those left over from the old régime and the libérés who may not return to France, the passions remain.

Some of the descendants of the old deportees are good citizens, some are not. Monsieur Roche, who kept and maybe still keeps a restaurant in the Rue Marengo, which opens off Coconut Square, was quite open with me on this point. His father, so he told me, had been exported unjustly. He had been a clock-maker and had made the clockwork that worked a bomb that blew up a deputy, or something of that sort—it was all a matter of politics; his father would not have hurt a fly in the ordinary way of life, whereas Chauvin, the keeper of an opposition restaurant round the corner, his father had been an assassin. “Yes, monsieur, a brigand, and ’tis easy to see how the blood has come out in the son.”

Monsieur Roche knew everything about everybody in Noumea.

He told me some strange stories and one of the strangest had to do with a woman; one of the strangest-looking women I have ever seen.

A half-breed of extraordinary but faded beauty, gay as a wasp in yellow and black striped foulard, but with something about her that would have repelled the mind, even if her beauty had been as fresh as the dew on the tamarisk blossoms.

She was mad.

As she passed the café door where we were talking she glanced at Monsieur Roche, laughed and went on.

“That is Marianne Ribot,” said the old fellow, craning his neck to look after her, “daughter of Jacques Ribot, who came here a great many years ago, served his sentence and settled down, marrying a Malay woman. He sold tobacco in the Rue Austerlitz; he had two daughters by the woman: Marianne, whom you have seen, and Cerise. Twins and like as two cherries. They were beauties. There is a curious thing about races, if you have 

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