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bian populace, and the exotic vegetation. Most of the boursiers also saw in France’s African posses-

sions the signs of an antique past. Study trips to ruined sites like the Roman amphitheaters at Tipasa

in Algeria or El Djem in Tunisia were frequent (even if few paintings resulted).

While most boursiers were remiss about filing reports with the director of fine arts, the one thing

that did make them write was money. The papers reveal many monthly missives from young bour-

 siers traveling far from France in unfamiliar circumstances, anxious about receiving their next schol-

arship installment. (It is not surprising that by the end of the century they had organized a “friendly

society” to improve their conditions.)8 Although the bureaucracy charged with ensuring payment

was far from perfect, the colonial system itself enabled the financial support to get through: the Roth-

schild Bank often forwarded moneys, or the nearest French consulate or agent: thus the artist trav-

elers were constantly reminded of their debt to the state.

The complaints of the boursiers were legion and give a good sense of the precariousness of their

mission and the stresses to which they were subjected. The young sculptor Félix Soulés conveys his

accumulated anxiety after traveling through Spain, Italy, and Algeria, writing from Tunisia that if 

his pay did not arrive soon, he would return to France, “not wishing to undergo the terrible worry

of finding myself without money, in a country unknown to me, where I do not speak the language

and where one must pay one ’s pension by the week.”9 The fortitude of other individuals, however,

was bolstered by recently completed military service. Indeed the military mentality was never far

from the colonial adventure. For example, Paul Bu¤et, an established young Orientalist in the line-

age of Guillaumet and Dinet who had shown at the conservative Salon de la Société des Artistes Français

since about 1890, after winning a bourse de voyage in 1894, used his 1896 Prix National to undertake

an intrepid journey to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia to document meetings between the French

ambassador to Ethiopia, Léonce Lagarde, and the negus, or Ethiopian emperor, Ménélik.10

The Ethiopian coast was remote enough for Arthur Rimbaud to have chosen it, over a decade be-

fore, as the location for the career in anomie that replaced his failed vocation of poet: as a merchant

with French and Italian companies trading into the African interior. Charles Nicholl describes Rim-

baud’s Ethiopia of the 1880s as a rough and uncertain place where communication between the few

large towns was tenuous and travel by caravan slow.11 Little had changed by the time Bu¤et arrived.

Given his desire to spend the whole year in Abyssinia, he was, as a ministry clerk wrote, “worried

about how he would be able to receive funds at Entotto, which is six hundred kilometers (twenty

days) from Djibouti, the nearest French port.”12 By December 1896 Bu¤et could write to the direc-

tor of fine arts from Harrar (where Rimbaud had lived for some years), reporting “how numerousand interesting the elements of study looked in the region that I have just crossed. . . . The difficul-

ties of communication are very great, but I hope to be able to arrive at the Abyssinian court in the

month of February.”13

 L’Illustration covered Ambassador Lagarde’s mission and many other events linked to Franco-

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