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In appearance, she had, as yet, none of the symptoms which, in Europe, betray dis ease of the lungs. Her figure was full and as perfect as a Greek statue. But the charac teristic short cough became more frequent, and the blue circles round her eyes grew darker. She was, in fact, a sad and pathetic personification of the Polynesian race as it gradu ally dies out under contact with our civilisation and our vices, soon to be no more than a memory in the history of Oceania. —Pierre Loti, referring to his Tahitian wife Rarahu, in “The Marriage of Loti”, a novel about Tahiti first pub lished in Paris in 1880. Loti visited Tahiti in 1872.