"_L'oeil interroge: rien ne bouge. L'oreille écoute: aucun bruit. Pas un souffle, si ce n'est le frémissement presque imperceptible de l'air au-dessus du sol embrasé. La vie semble avoir disparu, absorbée par la lumière. C'est le milieu du jour.... Mais le soir approche.... Les troupeaux rentrent dans les douars; ils se pressent autour des tentes, à peine visibles, confondus sous cette teinte neutre du crépuscule, faite avec les gris de la nuit qui vient et les violets tendres du soir qui s'en va. C'est l'heure mystérieuse, où les couleurs se mèlent, où les contours se noient, où toute chose s'assombrit, où toute voix se tait, où l'homme, à la fin du jour, laisse flotter sa pensée devant ce qui s'éteint, s'efface et s'evanouit._" [Illustration: _L'Art._ EUGÈNE FROMENTIN.] This description of a day in Algiers in Guillaumet's _Tableaux algériens_ interprets the painter Guillaumet better than any critical appreciation could possibly do. For him the East is the land of dreams and melting softness, a far-off health-resort for neurotic patients, where one lies at ease in the sun and forgets the excitements of Paris. It was not what was brilliant and pictorial in sparkling jewels and bright costume that attracted him at all, but the silence, the mesmeric spell of the East, the vastness of the infinite horizon, the imposing majesty of the desert, and the sublime and profound peace of the nights of Africa. "The Evening Prayer in the Desert" was the name of the first picture that he brought back with him in 1863. There is a wide and boundless plain; the straight line of the horizon is broken by a few mountain forms and by the figures of a party belonging to a caravan; but, bowed as they are in prayer, these figures are scarcely to be distinguished. The smoke of the camp ascends like a pillar into the air. The monotony of the wilderness seems to stretch endlessly to the right and to the left, like a grand and solemn Nirvana smiting the human spirit with religious delirium. [Illustration: FROMENTIN. ARABIAN WOMEN RETURNING FROM DRAWING WATER.]