“To Fromentin,” writes Gabriel Trarieux, “the function of an adjective is to appeal, not to the eye or ear, but to the moral sense. Nature, to this psychologist, is not an inert colour, but an inner voice. He shows us Africa, and more especially his own heart. Is such conscientiousness, such self-revelation, a distinctive mark of the native of Charente? For my part, I think it is.” His offerings to the Salon continued uninterruptedly, year after year. Only the more famous need be mentioned: _The Moorish Burial_ (1850); _The Negro Boatmen_ (1859); _Horsemen returning from a Fantasia_, _Couriers from the Land of the Ouled Naïls_ (1861); _The Arab Bivouac at Daybreak_, _The Arab Falconer_, _Hunting with the Falcon in Algeria, The Quarry_ (1863); _Windstorm in the Plains of Algiers_ (1864); _Heron Hunting_, _Thieves of the Night_ (1865); _A Tribe on the March through the Pasture_ _Lands of Tell, A Pool in an Oasis_ (1866); _Arabs attacked by a Lioness_ (1868); _Halt of the Muleteers_ (1869); and his last five pictures, _The Grand Canal_ and _The Breakwater_ (1872); _The Ravine_ (1874); _The Nile_ and _View of Esneh_ (1876). With the second picture that he exhibited, _The Place of the Breach in Constantine_, the talent of the painter was officially recognized by the bestowal of a Second Class Medal. Fromentin, nevertheless, knew his weaknesses. What distressed him the most was that he still saw what was _pretty_, rather than what was _great_; a defect of instinct which is particularly conspicuous in _The Moorish Burial_ (1850) and _The Gazelle Hunt_ (1859). He strove, by consulting nature ceaselessly, to rid himself of this _almost-but-not quite_ tendency, of which he could never have been cured by mere studio work. He soon began, as a matter of fact, to acquire a truer and broader vision. He grasped this singular fact, peculiar to tropical lands: namely, that, howsoever discordant the details of a landscape may be, they form a sum total that is always simple and easy to transcribe upon a canvas. Since he never played false, either with himself or with nature, he mirrored back accurately, through the crystal clearness of his mind, the form and colour of the objects before him. Looking to-day at such pictures as _An Audience before the Caliph_, _The Negro Boatmen_, and a host of others, we breathe in, just as we do in reading his books, that indefinable odour of the Orient which comes from the smoke of the camp fires and the tobacco, from the orange trees and from the persons of the natives themselves; we delight our eyes with the venerable olive trees of the sacred grove at Blidah, with the plain bounded on the north by the long chain of the hills of Sahel, low-lying, gray in the morning, ruddy at noon, with just one white spot toward the northeast, at Coléah, where there is a vast gap, formed by the course of the Mazapan River, through which we get a glimpse of the sea.