LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Plate | ||
| [I]. | Halt of Horsemen | Frontispiece |
| M. Sarlin’s Collection | ||
| [II]. | The Arab Encampment | 14 |
| Musée du Louvre | ||
| [III]. | Thirst | 24 |
| M. Jacques Normand’s Collection | ||
| [IV]. | The Sirocco in the Oasis | 34 |
| Musée du Louvre | ||
| [V]. | An Arab Fantasia | 40 |
| M. Sarlin’s Collection | ||
| [VI]. | Egyptian Women on the Bank of the Nile | 50 |
| Musée du Louvre | ||
| [VII]. | Hunting with the Falcon | 60 |
| Musée du Louvre | ||
| [VIII]. | Halt of Horsemen | 70 |
| Musée du Louvre |
I.—THE FIRST STEPS
EUGÈNE-SAMUEL-AUGUSTE FROMENTIN-DUPEUX was born at La Rochelle on the twenty-fourth of October, 1820. His family was a very old one and held in high honour throughout Aunis and Saintonge.
Aunis, one of the ancient provinces of France, glows languidly beneath the caresses of a humid sun, enveloped in a thin veil of ocean mists, and at times she seems to float in the midst of her waves and her sands, beneath a sky bounded by remote and indeterminate horizons, vague and immense, like some vast wreckage overgrown with gardens and oases. For more than a century, she was downtrodden by the English. But if she owes them the pain and humiliation of defeat, they at least inspired her with a passion for commercial greatness and a desire for wealth. Through her shipowners and bankers, she amassed riches that permitted her to devote a goodly share of her days to leisure and festivities, for the betterment of her material welfare and the embellishment of her mind. Thus in the midst of this industrious community, faithful to its duties, jealous of its liberty, there was slowly formed a powerful and cultured bourgeois class, eager for all forms of intellectual improvement.
Eugène Fromentin’s family was, on the father’s side, attached by ancient roots to the soil of Aunis. His ancestors were nearly all of them lawyers and judges, and as far back as they can be traced, even to the beginning of the eighteenth century, formed a part of this bourgeois class, which, in that region of ardent Protestantism, constituted a sort of aristocracy.