Life at Papeete soon became a burden. It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off — and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization. Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?

Noa Noa (1893) [Dover, 1985, ISBN 0-486-24859-3], p. 2.