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lrnE JOHNS HOPKINS y ' I 'VE ' SITY RESS

Space and Convention in Eugène Fromentin: The Algerian Experience

Author(s): Anne-Marie Christin and Richard M. Berrong
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 3, Image/Imago/Imagination (Spring, 1984), pp.
559-574
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 Space and Convention in Eugene Fromentin:
The Algerian Experience
Anne-Marie Christin

D URING that period of the nineteenth century when descrip-

tion, the virtues of which had been rediscovered, seemed to
make literature the direct extension of painting, Eugene Fro-
mentin, himself both painter and writer, insisted, quite to the con-
trary, on the difference between the two arts:

There can be no doubt that the plastic art has its own laws, limits, conditions
of existence, in a word, its own domain. I saw equally strong reasons why
literature should reserve and preserve its own domain. An idea can be ex-
pressed equally in both mediums, provided that it lends itself or is adapted
to each. But I saw that an idea's chosen form, and I mean its literary form,
demanded neither something better, nor something more than written lan-
guage offers. There are forms for the spirit, as there are forms for the eyes;
the language that speaks to the eyes is not that which speaks to the spirit.
And the book is there, not to repeat the painter's work, but rather to express
what that work does not say.I

In this same preface to the 1874 edition of Un ete dans le Sahara (A

Summer in the Sahara) and Une annee dans le Sahel (A Year in the Sahel),
Fromentin revealed the origin of the confusion that he condemned
in the writers of his era: the traditional hierarchy of the pictorial
genres, in which historical painting occupied the major place, had
been replaced by a conception that gave landscape painting an im-
portance that it had never had before:

French painting had already beG1 renewed and generally honored by a

school that was extraordinarily full of life, attentive, sagacious, gifted with a
sense of observation that was, at the very least, more subtle, with a sensibility
that was more acute. This school, like all the others, had its masters, its
disciples, and already its idolaters. One saw better than ever, they said; a
thousand details hitherto unknown were revealed. The palette was richer,
the design had more physiognomy. Living nature could at last be considered
for the first time in a largely faithful image, and be recognized in its infinite
metamorphoses .... It is not surprising that such a movement, occurring

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560 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

simultaneously with contemporary literature, should have had an influence

upon the latter, and that our writers, themselves sensitive, dreaming,
burning, their eyes wide open like ours, regarding such examples, experi-
encing such needs, should also have been eager to enrich their palettes and
to fill them with the colors of a painter. (Sahara, pp. 59-60) 2

If these analyses demonstrate the prudence of an artist who, be-

cause he was qualified in both of them, could have sided more than
anyone else with a fusion of the arts, they also are part of an aesthetic
procedure in which one is surprised to discover that the confusion
condemned at the level of artistic form is acclaimed when it is a
question of art's function. The fact that Fromentin managed to join
the visual acuity of a painter with the techniques of language caused
him to be recognized, even by his contemporaries, 3 as the most re-
markable landscape writer of his time: Algeria, Aunis, Egypt, Hol-
land-all these places that Fromentin visited or thought about-fill
the most beautiful pages of his books. This unanimous esteem was in
complete contradiction to what the painter-writer himself expected
from art, however. To be convinced of this, one has only to read the
lines that precede the passage just cited: "The same current carried
the art of painting and the art of writing out of their most natural paths.
It was less a question of man and much more a question of that which sur-
rounds him. It seemed that everything had been said, excellently and
definitively, about man's passions and forms, and that there remained
nothing left to do except to make him move in the changing setting
of new places, new climates, and new horizons" (Sahara, p. 59; my
italics).
Admittedly, this was written twenty years after Un ete dans le Sahara
and in a context that is, in fact, rather close to a denial. 4 It remains
no less true, however, that at a time when Fromentin, making his
first attempts as a writer, brought literary autonomy to description,
he already wanted to justify this autonomy from an aesthetic that was
incompatible with it, since this autonomy gave man a determining
place in the ladder of artistic values, while the newness of landscape
painting consisted precisely in having removed man from it. 5 The
theoretician refused to see what nevertheless constituted the greatest
originality of the practitioner. One can find an illustration and per-
haps the key to this paradox in Fromentin's pictorial creation and its
evaluation.
Fromentin had been a painter for ten years when he wrote Un ete
dans le Sahara, his first book. His tastes had gravitated toward land-
scapes early on, and it was in order to renew its themes and to confirm
his vocation that he had allowed himself to be drawn, despite the
strong reticence of his sedentary nature, toward distant Algeria. 6

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SPACE AND CONVENTION IN EUGENE FROMENTIN 561

The works that came out of these voyages are of two types: on the
one hand, sketches or drafts showing a great diversity of treatment,
among which are small oil-painted landscapes of an almost abstract
design, the modernity of which is still surprising today; on the other
hand, paintings conceived for the Salon. Not only is the technique of
the latter different-light, making use of vaporous touches-but the
composition itself is understood in a completely different fashion: the
landscape is almost never offered alone, but rather serves as back-
ground for figures and even for actual anecdotes. 7
Fromentin did not owe this surprising stylistic contrast simply to
the pictorial tradition of his time, according to which a painting, com-
posed in the studio, was not to be confused with a draft done "on
location." 8 History and the violent Algerian skies had detached him
from the nature that he had gone there to discover. 9 Henceforth,
academic conventions appeared to him to be a recourse against an
adventure that terrified him: Could one not be a convincing orien-
talist painter without leaving one's home, surrounding figures whose
attitudes and costumes had been verified against models with land-
scapes drawn from memory? Whether or not this option really sat-
isfied him, it was by it that Fromentin would henceforth define him-
self, and it was this option that he would try to establish as a theory.
His two Algerian books give witness to this strange shifting of
thought that led an observer of pure space-in other words, space
without man-an observer very concerned with the rigorous restora-
tion of such space, toward this traditional aesthetic so radically con-
trary to his thoughts, an aesthetic from which he should have de-
tached himself all the more.

II
Two years separate the publication of Un ete dans le Sahara (1857)
from that of Une annee dans le Sahel (1859). I cannot go over here at
length the complex relation that links the first book to the second;
Sahara was written afterwards as one of the episodes of Sahel, while
Sahel, by its sedentary theme, is explicitly opposed to everything in
Sahara that relates, more or less artificially, to the travelogue. 10 There
can be no doubt, however, that one single preoccupation dominates
these two texts and gives them a meaning-that of the regard (look,
glance; from the verb regarder: to look at, to watch), the regard of the
painter who keeps apart from his travel companions while they pro-
gress toward the desert-"As for me, you would most often find me
traveling a little apart from the most peaceful voyagers, so as to be
more to myself; now, watching [regardant] for hours on end the white

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562 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

burnouses moving against the long perspectives, their rumps shining,

the saddles with red backs; now turning away to see the red group
of our camels arrive from the distance marching in battle formation,
with their necks extended, their ostrich-like legs, and our picturesque
travel baggage piled on their backs" (Sahara, p. 94)-gr the regard of
the painter who isolates himself in Laghouat to contemplate the sun-
rise-"! pass my best hours, those that one day I will miss the most,
on the heights, most often at the foot of the East Tower, facing that
enormous horizon free in all directions, a horizon without obstacles
to block one's view, rising above everything, from east to west, from
south to north, mountains, town, oasis and desert" (Sahara, p. 184).
One finds this same regard in Sahel, but here it is detached from its
pictorial connotations:

I want to try some chez moi on this foreign land .... This time I have come
to live and reside here. In my opinion that is the best way to become familiar
with a lot while seeing little, to see well by observing often, to travel never-
theless, but as one attends a performance, allowing the changing tableaux to
renew themselves by themselves around a fixed point of view and an im-
mobile existence .... Here, as I ordinarily do, I trace a circle around my
house, I extend it as far as necessary to include the entire world within its
boundaries, and then I withdraw to the depths of my universe; everything
converges on the center where I reside and the unknown comes there to
search for me.11

And further on: "The house in which I reside is charming. It is posed

like an observatory between the slopes and the shore, and rises above
a marvelous horizon: on the left is Algiers, on the right the entire
basin of the gulf as far as Cape Matifou, which is indicated by a
greyish point between the sky and the water; in front of me is the
sea" (Sahel, p. 41).
Fromentin develops the philosophy of such contemplation while
talking about Turkish houses:

We understand nothing about the mysteries of such an existence. We enjoy

the countryside while strolling through it; if we return to our houses, it is to
shut ourselves up; but this reclusive life beside an open window, this im-
mobility before so great a space, this interior luxury, this softness of climate,
the long flow of hours, the laziness of customs, in front of oneself, around
oneself, everywhere, a unique sky, a radiant country, the infinite perspective
of the sea, all that should develop strange reveries, derange the vital forces,
change their course, mix something ineffable with the sad feeling of being a
captive. So, in the depths of these delicious prisons, an entire order of spir-
itual pleasures that are barely imaginable was born. (Sahel, p. 83)

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SPACE AND CONVENTION IN EUGENE FROMENTIN 563

Of course-and the writer himself stresses this point ("Furthermore,

my friend, did I not fool myself in attributing very literary sensations
to beings that certainly never had them?")-it would be erroneous
to believe that this analysis is objective: it only repeats at a different
level one of Fromentin's basic obsessions. For him, "to look" is not to
see a performance but rather to envisage it in all its forms from a
privileged location, to possess the ability to contemplate it while occupying
its center.
The person who speaks of "the center," and who wants to occupy
the center, implies two different things, however. Should one believe
that he means an abstract point, where countrysides converge as in
an optical foyer, or does he mean a place of appropriation, where the
inexistence of the observer allows him to transform reality in his own
imagination all that much more surely? Fromentin's ambiguity results
from the fact that these two values are intimately mixed in him. In
his system of thought only the person who mixes the personal inten-
sity of an emotion with his vision can see and appreciate that which
he sees-even if he observes with the rigorousness of a painter, for
whom the quality of the appearance is something strictly to be eval-
uated.12 It was in order to rediscover through writing a feeling of the
desert that the brutal reality of Laghouat had not been able to awake
in him, contrary to his experience with El Kantara several years be-
fore, that Fromentin made of his Sahara that striking "solar fable" 13
in which the light of an almost absolute midday is exalted:

It is ... the hour ... when the desert is transformed into an obscure plain.
The sun, suspended at its center, inscribes it in a circle of light the equal rays
of which strike it fully, in all directions and everywhere at the same time.
There is no longer light or shadow; the perspective indicated by the fleeting
colors almost ceases to measure the distances; everything is covered by a
brown tone, extended without a streak, without a mixture; fifteen or twenty
leagues of a countryside that is uniform and flat like a floor. ... Seeing it
begin at one's feet, then stretch out, plunging toward the south, the east, the
west, without any indicated route, without any inflection, one asks what this
silent land can be, clothed in a doubtful tone that seems to be the color of
the void; from which no one comes, to which no one goes, and which ends
with so straight and sharp a line against the sky. (Sahara, p. 186)

Sahel-a book of memories even more distant, since the period that
the book evokes preceded its writing by a dozen years-is placed
entirely under the sign of a first love of nature: "Here in two words
is my life: I produce little, I am not certain that I learn anything, I
watch and I listen. I put myself body and soul at the mercy of this
exterior nature that I love, that has always had control of me, and

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564 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

that now repays me with a great tranquility from the troubles known
to me alone, troubles that it has made me undergo" (Sahel, p. 74).
Here, as opposed to the Sahara, it is not the burning punctuality of
a moment when life seems to have stopped that moves the narrator,
but rather the fullness of this life, which is experienced everywhere:
"How sweet the land which regularly allows such leisures! Not a cloud
or a breeze, there is peace in the sky. One's body is bathed in an
atmosphere troubled by nothing, an atmosphere the temperature of
which one forgets because it never changes. From 6:00 A.M. to 6:00
P.M., the sun traverses imperturbably a stretch of space without
blemish, the true color of which is azure" (Sahel, p. 75). "If you trust
me, let us worship custom," Fromentin then exclaims. Such is the
feeling that presides in Une annee dans le Sahel, the philosophy of
which is quite close to that of Dominique: "It is not my fault if nature
at this point invades everything that I write. I give it here at most the
part that it has in my own life. To function in the midst of live sen-
sations, to produce without ceasing to be in correspondence with that
which surrounds us, to serve as a mirror for exterior things, but
willingly, and without being subject to them; in sum, to make of one's
own destiny what poets make of their poems, in other words to en-
close a strong action in reveries; ... that would be living" (Sahel, pp.
165-66).
Such avowals were hardly possible in the inhuman universe of the
Sahara, but one detects their presence, as if muted, on the edges of
the central narrative-through the play of analogies that associate
the larks of Djelfa with the countryside of La Rochelle or the ramparts
of Ai:n-Madhi with those of Avignon ("They resemble each other by
the effect that they produce," Fromentin writes [Sahara, p. 234; my italics],
revealing with these words what justifies such a comparison in his
eyes: a rediscovered familiarity), and above all, through the notation
of sounds, of rustlings, of bird cries that accompany each sunrise or
sunset like their symbolic counterpoint, a notation that most often
appears at the final stages of composition, like the following:

Around ten o'clock, a cavalry bugler came under my windows to play taps .
. . . Then the bugler fell silent. Other buglers answered him from the ends
of the town, weaker or more distinct; little by little these light notes of the
brass became dispersed, one by one, and I heard nothing more save the
sound of the palm trees. Then, feeling something like a weakness in my heart,
like a fearful desire to become tender, I blew out my candle, wrapped myself
in my blanket, and said to myself:
"Well! what? aren't I in bed? At home? and aren't I going to sleep?" (Sahara,
p. 145)

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SPACE AND CONVENTION IN EUGENE FROMENTIK 565

And was the desert not, itself, a birthplace? Was it not that which could
make it so troubling for the soul of a man who was himself also born
on the edge of a flat horizon-those leveled and salted plains around
La Rochelle? "The Saharans adore their land, and, as for myself, I
am close to justifying so passionate a feeling, especially when it is
joined with an attachment to one's native soil" (Sahara, p. 182).

III

Such is Fromentin's regard: he knows how to observe only that

which he loves, sometimes preferring a memory to a reality that de-
ceives him. This is the case with the gardens of Laghouat, of which
a traveller like 0. MacCarthy wrote an amazed description: "It would
be a rather difficult thing for me to give an exact idea of the beautiful
gardens of Laghouat. We have nothing similar and I can use nothing
as a term of comparison .... This splendid forest, due entirely to the
hand of man, beautiful under all weather, is especially beautiful
during the season of great heat, when in the distance everything is
burned, when one's glance, crossing with difficulty the shining plain
of light, finds at the horizon only the reddish sides of sterile moun-
tains .... " 14 For Fromentin, there are no real gardens save those that
he discovered in Biskra in 1848:

Unfortunately, the oasis [of Laghouat] resembles the town; it is drawn

together, compact, without open spaces, and infinitely subdivided .... If you
recall the gardens of the East, of which I spoke to you, if, like myself, you
see again the wide perspectives of Bisk'ra, the edge of the wood vanishing
in the sands, without an enclosing wall, and without earth or water; the last
palm trees swallowed up to the halfway point of the trunk; then the open
spaces with the grains, the green lawns; the sleeping and deep ponds of
T'olga, with the inverted silhouettes of the trees in a blue water; then, in the
distance, almost everywhere, and to close off this Saharan Normandy, the
desert showing between the date trees; perhaps you, like I, will find that this
land is missing something to sum up all the poetry of the Orient. (Sahara,
pp. 199-200) 15

This determining role of the impression in visual apprehension

brings with it in the writer two different conceptions of description.
Subjective description conditions what he calls a "vision":

Finally, the terrain fell away, and, in front of me, but still far distant, I saw
appear, above a plain struck with light, first, a hill of white boulders, with a
multitude of obscure points, sketching in violet black the upper contours of

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566 J',;EW LITERARY HISTORY

a town armed with towers; at the base was a cold green thicket, compact,
bristling lightly like the bearded surface of a field of grain. A violet bar, and
which appeared dark to me, was visible on the left, almost at the level of the
town; it reappeared on the right, still as stiff, and closed off the horizon.
(Sahara, p. 131)

A "view" from the same spot is done in more objective terms: "As we
approached, the oasis took shape on the right, the green crests of the
palm trees became more distinct, and we discovered a second hill,
like the first, covered with black houses;-no towers were visible;-
between the two a white monument; farther to the right, a third heap
of pink boulders capped with a marabout; still farther to the right, a
sort of steep pyramid, higher and pinker than all the rest; in the
intervals, the violet line of the desert continued to appear" (Sahara,
p. 132).
This distinction has more than just a literary value; it reflects the
hierarchy that Fromentin intended to establish between two types of
landscape art, the sketch and the painting. "Vision" makes the
"painting," and the writer associates the terms one with the other in
a completely explicit manner in the preceding description. 16 The
"view" is only a topographical report, in the style of the sketches that
Sahel attributes to the pencil of Vandell: "Nothing is more exact, or
sharper, or more detailed. Each contour is indicated in a childish
manner, by such a fine stroke that one would take it for the work of
the sharpest engraver's tool. Of course, there is neither light nor
shadow; it is the architecture of things, reproduced independently of
air, of color, of effect, in short, of everything that represents life"
(Sahel, pp. 167 -68). The true painting (tableau) must reproduce not
only the reality of a location, but also its atmosphere vecue (lived at-
mosphere); it must make visible to the spectator that which is not of
the order of the visible, but rather of the order of the experienced
emotion.
Is this not an impressionist conception? Bewitched by descriptions
that were able to penetrate him with both the image of locations and
their subjective qualities-the violence of the Saharan summer, the
sweetness of the Sahel autumns-the reader would be ready to be-
lieve that Fromentin intends, through his painting, to arrive at the
same result. And yet the truth is nothing of the sort. From Un ete
dans le Sahara and especially from Une annee dans le Sahel new con-
ditions for pictorial elaboration are born, conditions that do not
spring from impression.

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SPACE AND CONVENTION IN EUGENE FROMENTIN 567

IV
If one collects the different occurrences of the word tableau
(painting) in Fromentin's Algerian narratives, the first discovery that
one makes is that the tableau, in his mind, is not defined just by
painting. Nor is it a "vision"-even though it is this latter, and not
the "view," that should be expressed in a tableau. Before all else, a
tableau, for Fromentin, is an ordered composition, and, even more,
an image defined by a cadre (frame, framework).
Nevertheless, Un ete dans le Sahara is not very explicit on this point.
The problem does not seem to have been perceived clearly in that
book. A formula like "The first impression that results from this
burning and inanimate tableau, composed of sun, space, and solitude,
is poignant and can be compared to no other" (Sahara, p. 183) ob-
viously does not take into account the plastic limitations of painting.
The term is used here simply in the sense of "composed image." But
how can one express the expanse of the Sahara in a tableau? Was it
not in order better to express it that Fromentin set aside his brushes
and, for the first time, preferred writing to painting? In the same
respect, was it not deeply problematic to express the experience of
an itinerary (voyage) in a whole that is both fixed and partial? The
writer attempts it, nonetheless, at certain stages of the voyage. "I
never saw anything simpler than the tableau unrolled before us," he
said concerning the stop near Boghari (Sahara, p. 84), thereby com-
bining in an awkward formula the plastic instant and the temporal
adventure. The tableau is subsequently constructed according to its
traditional structure, however. The tents "already striped with red
and black as in the South" put "two squares of shadow" in the middle
of the horizon. The people are inscribed by scrupulously ranged
planes: "Standing in this gray shadow, and dominating the entire
landscape with their height, Si-Djilali, his brother, and their old fa-
ther, all three dressed in black, stood present in silence at the meal.
Behind them, and completely in the sunlight, was a circle of squatting
individuals, tall, dirty white faces, without wrinkles, without voices,
without gestures, and eyes blinking under the glare of the light and
apparently closed" (Sahara, p. 84). And this time, the image has its
limits: "Beyond, in order to complete and frame the scene, I could
perceive, from the tent where I lay, a corner of the douar, a bit of
the river where the free horses drank, and, all the way at the back,
long troops of brown camels, with their thin necks, lying on sterile
hillocks, the earth naked like sand and as white as grain" (Sahara,
p. 85).

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568 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

This tableau, however-"which I am copying from nature," Fro-

mentin said, in one of those ambiguous formulas that indicate, on
the contrary, a reevaluation of memories-does not satisfy the writer;
"it lacks grandeur, flash and silence" and that "one note that contains
everything: drink peacefully."
Should one believe, in Sahel, that distance and time passed favored
the appearance of a "narrower" vision and further justified the strict
conventions of the tableau? That would be simplifying things. What
changes with Sahel is, first, the nature of the country: "It is the in-
definite reduced to the proportions of the tableau and summed up
soberly in exact limits: a striking spectacle when all one has seen is
plains without limits or plains with too narrow contours, i.e., the lack
or excess of the grand" (Sahel, p. 186). The tone of the sentence
makes us feel it, however: these exactly limited plains correspond to
Fromentin's taste as much as to the reality of the countryside. This
measure truly pleases him, just as it suits him to observe the spectacle
of Algeria through the rectangle of his window: "Why couldn't the
summary of the Algerian country be contained in the small space
framed by my window; can't I hope to see the Arabian people file
past under my eyes along the main road or in the prairies that line
my garden?" (Sahel, p. 41). A real wish? Or a ·fiction, like this year-
long sojourn that the narrator of Sahel is supposedly telling us about?
The observer takes refuge behind the conventions of Alberti. This
should signal us that he will not attempt in his book to make those
who have not seen it see an overwhelming reality, as was the case in
Sahara. What he wants here is to inscribe it in aesthetic categories
that possess a universal value (so he believes, or wants to convince
himself).
Of course, Fromentin finds motives for this that are suited to him.
The same person who declared, on November 1, 1844, that he had
little affection for "that which runs, that which slides, or that which
flies," preferring "all immobile things, all stagnant waters, all gliding
or perched birds," found "an indefinable emotion" in the balanced
spectacles that classic painting offered. From Sahara to Sahel the same
need for stilled images clearly appears. Equilibrium is the first quality
of the panorama of Ain-Mahdi: "The general tableau, instead of
shaking in all directions and bending under all angles, according to
the custom of the Saharan villages, maintains a perpendicularity of
lines and is sketched by right angles that were very satisfying to the
eye" (Sahara, p. 234). On this point the countrysides of Sahel leave
the narrator unsatisfied several times. When it rains: "Do you know
what is most irksome for the spirit in this dark tableau, a tableau com-
posed confusedly of falling rain, rolling waves, spouting foam,

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SPACE AND CONVENTION IN EUGENE FROMENTIN 569

moving clouds? It is not finding equilibrium anywhere .... Nothing

to stop the view, or to allow it to rest, or to satisfy it by fixing it on
points of support; a floating expanse, an indecisive perspective of
forms that cannot be grasped ... " (Sahel, p. 101). Or at the moment
of the festivities of Ai:d-el-Fould: "Let us not speak of taste in such a
subject, anyway. For today, let us abandon the rules. It is a question
of a tableau without discipline, one that has almost nothing in common
with art" (Sahel, p. 156).
Nevertheless, these two spectacles trigger curiously contradictory
reactions on the part of the writer. A tormented landscape, which
makes him suffer intimately, leads him to formulate astoundingly
rigorous remarks: "I work; I console myself with light colors, rigid
forms, very sharp great lines. It is not gaiety that pleases me in light;
what delights me is the precision that it gives to contours; of all the
attributes of size, the most beautiful, in my opinion, is immobility. In
other words, I have no serious taste for anything except durable
things, and I only consider with passionate feelings things that are
fixed" (Sahel, p. 101). On the other hand, the tumults of Ai:d-el-Fould
arouse in him a remarkable indulgence: "It was very beautiful, and
in this unexpected alliance of costumes and statuary, of pure form
and barbarous fantasy, there was an example of taste that is detestable
to follow but dazzling .... Let us refrain from discussing it; let us
watch. And so I should have done, and I went for a walk, watching,
noting the details, living only by my eyes, sunk without afterthought
or scruple in this whirl of colors in movement" (Sahel, p. 156). In-
coherence? Certainly not, unless in appearance. The stakes are very
different in the two cases. The first involves man and his essential
passions-that of a calmed nature, where one can fully appreciate
the pleasures of space and regard. The second involves the painter.
For the painter Fromentin, true art must be reached through the
representation of figures and faces.1 7 Their disorder can seem
shocking; it remains, nonetheless, legitimate. It will be the task of the
creator to adapt it subsequently to the requirements specific to the
tableau.
The two Algerian narratives give us a still more significant example
of those tumults detested by the man but which the painter justifies
when they can be interpreted according to humanist conventions. In
Un eti dans le Sahara, Fromentin explicitly admits that "spectacles of
chivalry," as he calls them, leave him more than indifferent: "Before
such a land, in a frame of this size, I cannot keep from finding almost
without effect the rather theatrical staging of this life mixed with
hunting, thrusts, parades, and sometimes with gallantry" (Sahara, p.
116). He nevertheless resigns himself to describing this life, in a page

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570 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

(written later, it is true, since it does not appear in the manuscript)

that presents us with goum horsemen crossing Laghouat at a gallop:
"The pavement rang; one heard the iron stirrups and the long spurs
clank against the animals' flanks; the human torsos of the centaurs
did not move. Each horseman passed, laughing at friends standing
in their doorways, his eyes flaming and shaking his long rifle as if he
would have to make use of it. I could not say why this thing-a thing
so simple and which one sees so commonly, a horseman galloping in
the street-struck me at this particular place" (Sahara, p. 171).
It is a totally different matter in Une annee dans le Sahel. At the same
time that he was completing his narrative by inventing a female char-
acter, Haoua, adapted from an uncompleted story by his friend Ar-
mand du Mesnil, 18 Fromentin introduced, in the last pages of his
book, a long evocation offantasia. These two very different additions
are, in reality, parallel. The appearance of a female figure was sup-
posed to make Sahel qualify for that category among literary genres
that the nineteenth century held to be superior to the travelogue: the
novel. 19 Thefantasia-in which this same woman encounters death-
would also offer the reader-spectator of the book a vision that con-
formed more closely than landscape vision to the requirements of
"great painting": "Give the scene its true cadre-with which you are
familiar-calm and white, a little veiled by the dust, and perhaps you
will glimpse, in the confusion of a joyous, holiday-like action, intox-
icating like war, the dazzling spectacle that they call an Arabianfan-
tasia. This spectacle is awaiting its painter. One man alone today could
understand and express it; only he would have the ingenuous fantasy
and the force, the audacity and the right to attempt it" (Sahel, pp.
208-9). This painter could only be Delacroix, obviously. The praise
devoted to him in the preceding pages allows for no doubt. Yes, only
a master could treat a scene such as this. Because it was particularly
difficult to transpose? Perhaps, and Fromentin himself suffered in
order to describe it, as evidenced by the numerous manuscript ver-
sions of this evocation that we possess. It is necessary that "mastery"
be understood in a somewhat different sense, however, one much
more essential to the writer. For Fromentin, the master was not
simply an artist capable of interpreting excessively delicate scenes. He
first had to define himself by links to tradition-a tradition that he
helped to renew, no doubt-by having steeped himself in its lessons
and attempted to prolong them.
Still, what is more oriental than a fantasia? more typical of "genre"
(i.e., anecdotal) painting? Fromentin has his answer ready, and the
term centaur, which he introduced in Sahara (only to exclude it from
Sahel), already allowed us to guess it:

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SPACE AND CONVENTION IN EUGENE FROMENTIN 571

Reduced to completely simple elements, watching in this superabundant

staging only one group, and in this group only one horseman, the fantasia-
in other words the gallop of a well-mounted horse-is still a singular spec-
tacle, as is any equestrian exercise performed to show in their moment of
activity the two most intelligent and most formally complete creatures that
God has made .... Artistic Greece imagined nothing more natural, or
grander. ... From this monster with real proportions, which is only the
audaciously figured alliance of a robust horse and a handsome man, Greece
formed the teacher of her heroes, the inventor of her sciences, the preceptor
of the most agile, the bravest and the most handsome of men. (Sahel, p. 209)

A Hellenic fantasia? Most certainly, because the masters had so de-

termined things. 20 In his haste to give a meaning-and a traditional
meaning-to the landscapes that he had discovered, Fromentin does
not worry about coherence, or about making a seemingly realistic
choice. Such is the literary drama of Une annee dans le Sahel-and the
moving error of his painting, including those canvases of Venice and
Egypt, or that enigmatic portrait of a woman, that indicate, in the
last years of his relatively brief life, 21 the will of a painter who had
finally become free. Whether it was a question of real blindness, how-
ever, or of an anguish born of the feeling that he could create an
original work (in other words, a solitary work: no one was more afraid
of creating alone-as I have tried to show elsewhere [Sahara, pp. 24-
25]-than this unusual artist), Fromentin had constructed for himself
a prison that was to protect him in advance against the dangers of
the new. In so privileged a book as Un ete dans le Sahara-privileged
because its author, too concerned with speaking correctly and mas-
tering the adventure that writing was for him at that time, worried
only slightly yet about elaborating his theoretical principles-we see
the walls of this prison already beginning to rise. One example is
enough to prove this, but it is also the most satisfying example.
We are in Ai'n-Mahdi. There the narrator finds those raised ob-
servatories that, from his personal memories of the lighthouse in
Dominique, Fromentin would continue to celebrate: "Our house is con-
fined to the gardens of the southwest side. From my terrace, leaning
on a crenelated wall that is part of the rampart, I take in a large part
of the oasis and the entire plain, from the south, where the flaming
sky vibrates under the distant reverberations of the desert, to the
northwest, where the arid plain, burnt, the color of hot ash, rises
imperceptibly toward the mountains" (Sahara, p. 239). The text does
not stop there, however-or rather, it no longer stops there. Because
the writer completed this evocation in the manuscript with a com-
mentary in the edition, a commentary in which emotion abruptly

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572 J\:EW LITERARY HISTORY

Eugene Fromentin. Arabs Hawking. Musee Conde, Chantilly. Lauros-Giraudon.

demurs before culture: "These views from on high always please me,
and I have always dreamed of large figures in a simple action, ex-
posed against the sky and dominating a vast countryside. Helen and
Priam, at the top of the tower, name the leaders of the Greek army;
Antigone led here by her governor to the terrace of Oedipus's palace,
trying to recognize her brother in the midst of the camp of the seven
leaders, these are tableaux that excite me and that seem to me to
contain all the possible solemnities of nature and of human drama"
(Sahara, p. 239).
A real passion? Or literature? It is up to the reader to decide. There
can be no doubt, however, that this official Hellenism was supposed
to smother more ingenuous discoveries under its parade. The writer
who should have been assured a new role by his painter's regard pre-
ferred to conform first to the laws and conventions of his past. His
eyes were closed by his memory.

UNIVERSITY OF PARIS VII

(Translated by Richard M. Berrong)
NOTES

Eugene Fromentin, Un ete dans le Sahara, ed. Anne-Marie Christin (Paris, 198 I), p.
60. Hereafte r cited in text as Sahara.

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SPACE AND CONVENTION IN EUGENE FROMENTIN 573

2 This growing importance of landscapes in the first part of the nineteenth century
was not simply a phenomenon of taste. The place of these painters continued to grow
in the Salon, and the Universal Exposition of 1855, which accepted thirteen of Theo-
dore Rousseau's paintings, provided them with a definitive consecration.
3 So Maxime du Camp wrote, in his Souvenirs litteraires: "No particular one of his
paintings, nor his work taken in its entirety, will ever be worth L'Ete dans le Sahara. It
is a unique book, a model of description to which no one, not even Theophile Gautier,
came near. ... I consider it a great honor for the Revue de Paris to have published this
volume, which is the debut-the masterpiece-of Fromentin in letters. Right off he
attained the heights and never surpassed himself" ([Paris, 1962], pp. 265-66).
4 In fact, in his 1874 preface Fromentin wrote concerning these two books: "From
the distance at which everything they evoke places me, it is not important whether it
is one country rather than another, desert rather than crowded places, permanent sun
rather than the shadows of our winters" (Sahara, p. 58).
5 On this subject see my article on "L'ecrit et le visible: le XIXe siecle frarn;ais,"
L'Espace et la Lettre, Cahiersjussieu, No. 3 (Paris, 1977), in particular pp. 172-77.
6 The historical background of these voyages can be found in Sahara, pp. 12-20.
7 In 1847, returning from his first voyage, Fromentin offered the Salon a Vue prise
dans les gorges de la Chiffra (View Taken in the Gorges of Chiffra). In 1849, in addition to
three views of Algiers and Constantine, he already exhibited works in which the
"figure" occupied the central place: Tentes de la smala de Si=Hamed bel Hadj and Smala
passant l'oued Beraz. See Louis Gonse, Eugene Fromentin peintre et ecrivain (Paris, 1877);
Prosper Dorbec, Eugene Fromentin (Paris, 1926); and the forthcoming works of B.
Wright and J. Thompson.
8 This distinction is particularly striking under the pen of Baudelaire, who in his
Salon de 1859 precedes the fiery praise of Boudin's sketches with this dogmatic-and
contradictory-declaration: "M. Boudin, who could be proud of his devotion to his
art, shows his curious collection very modestly. He well knows that all this must become
painting by means of poetic impression recalled at will; and he does not make the
pretense of presenting his notes as paintings. Later, no doubt, in completed paintings,
he will lay out before us the prodigious magics of air and water." Curiosites Esthetiques
(Paris, 1962), p. 377.
9 On this subject, see Sahara, pp. 21-25.
10 See my Fromentin conteur d'espace (Paris, 1982), ch. 2, "Les Saisons du Sahel."
11 Eugene Fromentin, Une annee dans le Sahel, ed. Anne-Marie Christin (Paris, 1981),
pp. 40-41. Hereafter cited in text as Sahel.
12 This attention to the correct color is particularly evident in the evocation of Bog-
hari: "It's bizarre, striking; I did not know anything like it, and until now I had never
imagined anything so completely wild-let's say the word that I find so difficult to
say-so yellow. I would be very sad if the word was used, because the thing has already
been taken advantage of too often; besides, the word is brutal; it denatures a tone of
great finesse, a tone that is only an appearance. To express the action of the sun on
this burning earth by saying that this earth is yellow, is to spoil everything and make
it ugly. As a result, it is not worth talking about color and declaring that it is beautiful;
those who have not seen Boghari are free to fix its tone according to their spirits'
preferences" (Sahara, p. 85).
13 This transformation of the narrative into the fable is evident when one studies the
genesis of Un ete dans le Sahara from its manuscripts. See Sahara, pp. 26-39.
14 0. MacCarthy, Almanach de l'Algerie pour 1854, cited in Sahara, pp. 254-55.
15 By "impression," Fromentin understands not the "sentiment of nature," too Ro-
mantic and literary for his taste, but rather what I tried to define as the presence of the

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574 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

memory (Sahara, p. 29)-in other words, the condensation of a personal emotion and
of pure plastic observation.
16 "Such is the complete view of El-Aghouat from the north side; the first was a
vision; I give you the latter, more extended and from which I do not believe that I
omitted anything, as a view" (Sahara, p. 132).
17 As early as September 11, 1852, Fromentin declared to his friend Paul Bataillard:
"From my first voyage I brought back perceptions, aspects, collections, figures like
ants: I could not repeat that .... Henceforth I will have to put eyes on these heads,
kneecaps and ankles on those legs, physiognomies on those faces. The landscape will
disappear there, and it is a stroke of good luck, because I am turning to the figure,
and for me it is a demonstrated law that I abandon myself to the penchant that turns
me away from pure landscape and draws me toward the human figure." Correspondance
et fragments inedits, ed. Pierre Blanchon (Paris, 1912), p. 63.
18 On this subject, see Fromentin conteur d'espace, ch. 3, "La femme, la litterature et
la mort."
19 This hierarchy appears clearly in Fromentin's way of speaking of Dominique, May
30, 1862: "A novel after two travel books, a man's book, after literary essays that one
could tolerate from a painter, was a considerable enterprise, one full of danger" (Cor-
respondance, p. 146).
20 Such is the paradoxical aesthetic at which Fromentin arrives in Une annee dans le
Sahel, an aesthetic that would surprise his public, beginning with George Sand and
Sainte-Beuve: "I was on the edge of the Seine, one spring day, with a famous landscape
painter who was my master [Cabat] .... 'Do you know,' my master said to me, 'that a
shepherd at the side of a river is something very beautiful to paint?'-The Seine had
changed names, just as the subject had changed meaning: the Seine had become the
river.- Who among us will be able to make of the Orient something sufficiently indi-
vidual and at the same time general enough to become the equivalent of this simple
idea of the river?" (Sahel, pp. 180-81).
21 Born in 1820, Fromentin died of a lip infection in 1876, several months after the
publication of Les Maitres d'autrefois.

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