4 pages, 4 figures ; International audience ; We study the existence of a spin-glass phase in a field using Monte Carlo simulations performed along a nontrivial path in the field--temperature plane that must cross any putative de Almeida-Thouless instability line. The method is first tested on the Ising spin glass on a Bethe lattice where the instability line separating the spin glass from the paramagnetic state is also computed analytically. While the instability line is reproduced by our simulations on the mean-field Bethe lattice, no such instability line can be found numerically for the short-range three-dimensional model.