ABSTRACT
In late 1877, in addition to the conflict over the gilded screen, a range of other disputes about money, bad debts, and unpaid bills contributed to Caraman’s worsening situation. The Protectorate wanted Caraman to pay for past deliveries of wine and bread from government stores.1 The palace interpreter Boniface Ferrer and his Vietnamese wife, his former friends and neighbors, had recently turned against him over an old quarrel involving unpaid deliveries to the palace, and they now wished to never again have “the least rapport between us of whatever kind whatsoever.”2 A Malay neighbor called La held grievances against him, and Caraman still owed Thi San, a local fruit vendor, a compensation for minor injuries, to which he had been sentenced by a Phnom Penh court as a result of an accident involving his dogs.3
