ABSTRACT Like Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, his junior by 20 years, was a distinguished Orientalist painter and writer. Fromentin, in some of his major paintings, revisited themes that he had treated earlier in his travel writings, Un été dans le Sahara (1854) and Une année dans le Sahel (1857). Conversely, Guillaumet revisited some of his earlier paintings in serialised essays, published as “Tableaux algériens”, in La Nouvelle Revue of 1880; these texts were republished posthumously in book form, with illustrations, in 1888. The differing approaches of these two peintres-écrivains are central to the evolution of word–image relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their work, at one level, was intended to track the military progress of the French colonial army in Algeria and, at another level, to evoke details of daily life in the sedentary and nomadic peoples of that country. In so doing, they testify to the greatness of nineteenth-century French Orientalist painting, in terms of visual perspective, while, at the same time, heralding its decline, inasmuch as excessive accuracy of representation came dangerously close to ethnography, as opposed to art – a danger signalled by Duranty, in La Nouvelle Peinture (1870), and later by Fromentin, in Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876).

This is a study of visual narrative in French art — predominantly history painting — from its rise in the seventeenth century to its controversial demise at the end of the nineteenth century. In this connection, art history needed to catch up to take account of the work of literary narratologists such as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Gérard Genette, and Mieke Bal. The ut pictura poesis doctrine, inherited from the Italian Renaissance, was key to the development of history painting in post-Renaissance France, with painting being lauded as silent poetry and linear temporality being deemed virtually unattainable through image alone. Yet, in Poussin’s Les Israélites recueillant la manne dans le désert (1637–39), Claudine Mitchell highlights the simultaneous representation of successive actions, and Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc applies the theories of Genette very effectively to the north bays of the Grande Galerie at Versailles. In the first years of the reign of Louis XV there was a glitch, vividly described here by Susanna Caviglia, when history painting eschewed glorious action for states of static ‘absorption’ (notably in the works of François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire), casting doubt on the viability of narrative painting and leading, as a reaction, to a revival of serious history painting in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The experience of the French Revolution challenged the emphasis of classical historiography on a single hero acting in a single place and time. New mass audiences were addressed and drawn into empathy with a much wider spectrum of subjects than the antiquity and mythology of the earlier period. As shown masterfully by Beth Wright, Delacroix puts the reader to work, inspiring spectators to create their own mental pictures. This approach also informs Patricia Smyth’s presentation of Paul Delaroche, whose Assassinat du duc de Guise au château de Blois en 1588 (1834) is so often characterized as the work of a ‘literary’ painter, but is shown here to challenge the spectator’s mental conception of everyday objects. Indeed, inanimate things are shown by Nina Lübbren to be treated by painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Jean-Paul Laurens in the same pictorial register as animate humans, thus foreshadowing the ultimate abolition of generic distinctions. Gustave Moreau, as presented by Scott Allan, fought a rearguard action in defence of history painting: although he deplored its theatricality and its loss of ‘plastic’ identity, Moreau sought to preserve its ideals on new pictorial grounds, pivoting between rigorous selection and inspired choice of ornament. The over-dependence of art on its literary and narrative aspects was highlighted, in very different ways, by the Impressionists and later by Gauguin, who nevertheless, as outlined by Belinda Thomson, integrated verbal commentary and wordplay into his painting. The outstanding essay in this excellent volume is that of Peter Cooke, in which he brings all these strands together, showing the ubiquity of temporality, despite its Protean existence as a function of the ever-changing roles of the viewer.

Dedicated to Simone Bernard-Griffiths, the doyenne of Quinet studies, this excellent volume fills a major gap by providing a composite view of Edgar Quinet as a poet and a theoretician of poetry. Emerging from the first two years of the ITEM-CNRS seminars on ‘Poésie et religion, génétique des textes poétiques’, it tracks the works that, in the first edition of Quinet’s Œuvres complètes , were described as his ‘ouvrages d’imagination’: the trilogy ( Ahasvérus (1833), Napoléon (1836), Prométhée (1838)) and Les Esclaves (1853) — together with Merlin l’enchanteur (1860). The first and the last of these were written in prose and the three middle titles in verse, each accompanied by a preface in which it is clear that Quinet theorized his work, even as he created it. The prefaces to the trilogy are reproduced in this volume, as well as four of the most celebrated reviews of Quinet’s work: those by Charles Magnin, Félix Ravaisson, Alexandre Vinet, and Saint-René Taillandier. Quinet, as is well known, sought single-handedly to bring about a revival of epic poetry, which had fallen into decline in France after the twelfth century. If history in the post-Revolutionary period had become ‘heroic’, a parallel development needed to take place in the realm of poetry. It is in this context that he reconfigured the legend of the Wandering Jew, in the ‘eternal’ life of Ahasvérus, casting the past in the framework of universal humanity, playing on cyclical, repetitive figures echoing each other and resonating in perpetuity. Similarly, he sought to highlight the poetry of the present, in transforming Napoléon, the heroic individual, to a supra-temporal legendary myth. The poetry of the future is anticipated in Prométhée , where the hero’s incarceration, as he is chained to a rock in the Caucasus, is made to prefigure the crucifixion of Christ, rising democracy being directly linked to the teachings of Christ — as opposed to those of the Church, which Quinet considered to be sclerotic. After the upheaval of the 1848 Revolution and Louis Napoléon’s 1851 coup d’état , which led to Quinet’s exile, he returned to verse drama in Les Esclaves , with Spartacus taking up the defence of all those who had been silenced into ‘slavery’. After a still longer break, Quinet produced the poetically conceived and deeply ironic prose drama, Merlin l’enchanteur . While there was a direct correlation between Quinet’s poetry and those periods of his life when he was most seized of a new vision of humanity, the intervening essays, such as Du génie des religions (1842), show the abiding importance of poetry throughout his work. The influence of the Italian poets, in the early years, is clearly brought out by Clélia Anfray; the importance of architecture, especially in the Spanish context, by Encarnacíon Medina Arjona; and the historical backcloth, by Gérard Gengembre. Outstanding among these essays, however, are the forward-looking Introduction by the editor, Sophie Guermès, and her perceptive essays on Ahasvérus and Prométhée , together with those by Simone Bernard-Griffiths on Napoléon and Merlin l’enchanteur . The only flaw in an otherwise exemplary bibliography is the omission of Georgette Vabre Pradal’s La Dimension historique de l’homme: ou, le mythe du juif errant dans la pensée d’Edgar Quinet (Paris: Nizet, 1961).

Itinerary of Eugene Fromentin's painting. Arabe a cheval portant en croupe un fou. On 2 February 2013, the Musee des Beaux Arts in La Rochelle acquired a painting by Eugene Fromentine, Arabe a cheval portant en croupe un fou, which had already made its way to the United States by the beginning of the 20th century which was owned by one family there, from 1903 to 2013. This work, which probably dates from the 1860s, is important in Fromentin's development as an Orientalist painter, but also marks the close links between word and image in the creative imagination of this artist, who was both a painter and a writer. Two scenes from his travel account, Un ete dans le Sahara, provide the subjet-matter of the painting and refer to the respect shown, in the Arab world, to those suffering from mental illness, a topic to which Fromentin had already been sensitized by virtue of the fact that his father had created, near to La Rochelle, one of the first purpose-built psychiatric hospitals in France. The preliminary drawings throw light on the genesis of the paintings, in parallel with the development of the verbal account. This happy discovery shows how, despite all the formal differences separating, the techniques of painting and writing, a theme can be traced, in its simultaneous development, in time, and in the two media, in the work of Fromentin.

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Reviewed by: The Wild Ass's Skin by Honoré de Balzac Barbara Wright Balzac, Honoré de . The Wild Ass's Skin. Translated by Helen Constantine; edited with Introduction and Notes by Patrick Coleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), 2012. Pp. xxx + 252. ISBN: 0199579504. This new translation of Balzac's La Peau de chagrin is a useful addition to the already considerable corpus of work on a text which has proved to be as protean in its transformations as its fictional counterpart, the skin that shrinks as each desire of its owner is fulfilled. It began life as a conte fantastique and was then embedded in a short novel, before taking its place at the head of the Études philosophiques in the collectively reordered La Comédie humaine, published in 1845 (but distributed in 1846) by Furne. This latter text, known as the Furne corrigé, provides the basis for this translation. Helpfully, the notes highlight name changes (such as the substitution of Horace Bianchon for Prosper, in the 1838 edition), as well as some of the most significant variants in the earlier editions (such as the expanded description of the Lac du Bourget or the excision of the word "allegedly" preceding references to our "immaterial soul" [217] up to the 1838 edition). Indeed, this edition is the first in English to include, in the Appendix, Balzac's original Preface, dropped in all subsequent editions in the author's lifetime. The Introduction is, in essence, a distillation of Chapter 5 of Patrick Coleman's Reparative Realism: Mourning and Modernity in the French Novel (1998). As such, it is extremely valuable. Based on sound preliminary research, it comes up with all the explanatory notes that the general reader might need, without ever being heavy or pedantic. Helen Constantine's translation is racy in tone and surmounts with grace the many challenges posed by Balzac's excursions into the world of natural science. She gets over the problematic rendering of "Vouloir," in the crucial "Vouloir/Pouvoir" dichotomy, by replacing versions in earlier translations, such as "will," or "to have your will," by "what a man wants and what he can do" (p. 28). Her rendering of "conséquentes" as "consequential" (p. 226), in the August 1831 Preface, might more effectively have read "consistent," but her translation, in general, is excellent. In keeping with the overall policy of making the text more accessible to the contemporary reader, the translator's paragraphing is her own. The decision to include the August 1831 Preface—the shortest-lived Preface on [End Page 317] record, as Gérard Genette has pointed out—was an inspired one. It provides Patrick Coleman with a valuable lever with which to bring out the historical significance of the text (with shades of Pierre Barbéris and the latter's exploration of the original edition), while, at the same time, stressing the aesthetic significance of presenting the protagonist both from within (in the first-person narrative flashback of his long confession) and from without (in sandwiching that confession between the more nuanced third-person accounts of how over-involvement can be detrimental to the fulfillment of artistic ambition). As Tim Farrant has pointed out, in Balzac's Shorter Fictions (2002), Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien had just been published posthumously in 1830, with its advocacy of detachment as a prerequisite for the successful art-work—a theme which Balzac deftly wove into the argument in the first part of the Preface, attempting to clarify what separates an author from the subject of his works. Indeed, the "second sight" of the artist, as highlighted in the later part of this Preface, illuminates the detachment implicit in the concept of "SAVOIR," as advocated by the centenarian antiquary, in preference to the forces of "Vouloir" and "Pouvoir." Patrick Coleman's Introduction provides an admirable survey of the many vantage-points from which La Peau de chagrin has been studied: as the anvil on which realism in literature was forged; the tale which, with others, caused the element of the fantastic to enter the French literary canon; a socio-critical analysis in the context of the July Monarchy; a study in Romantic...

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During the Carbonaceous Species Method Comparison Study (CSMCS) conducted in August, 1986 by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in Glendora, CA, carbonyls in ambient air were collected using cartridges impregnated with 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine (DNPH) and phosphoric acid. The resulting hydrazones, including those of formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, were separated and quantitated using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). During the 10-day study, 110 samples were collected, including 12 field blanks, 12 backup cartridges, and 8 duplicate (collocated) samples. The measured concentrations ranged from 3.5 to 21.3 ppb for formaldehyde, and from 2.4 to 17.4 ppb for acetaldehyde. Diurnal variations, typically high around midday and low at nighttime, persisted throughout the study period. The coefficients of variation calculated from duplicate samples were 5.4% for formaldehyde and 4.0% for acetaldehyde. On the average, the DNPH method gave formaldehyde levels ∼ 0.7 ppb lower than the mean of spectroscopic techniques. By comparison, the tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) results were 0.5 ppb lower, while the Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and the differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) results were 0.2 and 0.3 ppb higher, respectively. These observed differences for the four methods were all statistically significant by the correlated t-test. Current affiliation: Atmosphere Assessment Associates, 4121 Matisse Ave., Woodland Hills, CA 91364. Notes Current affiliation: Atmosphere Assessment Associates, 4121 Matisse Ave., Woodland Hills, CA 91364.

This is an evocation of Baudelaire's world for the whole of the English-speaking world. It is a tour de force, in that it leaves no area untouched — the poetry, the prose, the prose poetry, the criticism of art and literature, the correspondence, the unfinished projects — and yet it maintains a lightness of touch, which conceals the lifetime of erudition underpinning it. Claude Pichois is quoted as remarking that, with the published work of Baudelaire, we see only the tip of the iceberg; indeed no-one was better placed than he to make such an observation, given the Herculean task which he completed, just before his death, in relation to the diplomatic edition of Les Fleurs du mal. The depth and shifting complexity of the area beneath the Baudelairean surface are brought out so effectively by Lloyd because, eschewing more obvious potential presentations in terms of chronology, theme or form, she has opted instead for a kaleidoscopic pattern, inspired by that of Baudelaire himself in Le Spleen de Paris. This is coupled with close readings of some central poems, notably ‘Le Cygne’, recurring in different and mutually enriching contexts. Such an approach yields handsome dividends, especially in the chapter on ‘The Art of Transposition’, where the boundaries between critical and creative writing are rejected, the subtleties of light effects in painters' skies are translated into prose and sculpture is studied for its effects of anamorphosis — all features which herald the twentieth century. Throughout the different ‘worlds’ evoked in this lucid and beautifully written book — the worlds of childhood, women, friends, dreams, city life — the emphasis is twofold: bringing out the importance of creative participation on the part of the reader and highlighting the combination of the eternal and the contingent in Baudelaire's modernism.