 While in Algeria, Monet did only a few sketches of casbah scenes, a single landscape, and several portraits of officers, all of which have been lost.In a "Le Temps" interview of 1900 however he commented that the light and vivid colours of North Africa "contained the germ of my future researches".After about a year of garrison duty in Algiers, Monet contracted typhoid fever and briefly went absent without leave.