A canon at Cuzco, Peru, in his study, studying natural sciences while his adopted children fight. Wood engraving by Picard after E. Riou.

He is sitting at a desk in a room crowded with books, papers, a telescope and a globe, writing as he watches three small children fighting on the floor. "The most perfect picture of this kind, and the most affecting example of these domestic manners, is presented by the house of a canon, a friend of mine, a philosopher by instinct, and by opportunity a professor of experimental physics. His study was a loft lighted from the roof; an indefinable but poisonous odour exhaled from this sanctuary of science, into which I never entered without holding a lemon to my nose. No den in the dirtiest corner of Orleans, no marine store-shop, ever possessed a more confused heap of books, instruments, rags and waste-paper; no dirty nook was ever so covered with dust or interlaced with cobwebs. Our canonical friend, seated at a table, occupies himself in working out his ideas on paper, and keeping them bright by repeated draughts of Carlon wine. If his hands stay, it is only to notice, with a smile, the three young monkeys -- his adopted children -- who are screaming and fighting over each other on a mat ..." (Marcoy, loc. cit.)