Our working meetings follow each other according to a common pattern and with the regularity of astronomical events. No festival, no great event prevents the Academy from meeting once a week to receive and register research work and to discuss impersonal truths.

A person, who devotes his life to the study of the sciences or the arts, must surely know how to control his desires and regulate his needs.

Turning up every Monday at about 3 o'clock at the Institute, signing the attendance register on arrival, accepting the minutes of the previous meeting, helping at every other meeting (each fortnight) in analysing the correspondence without taking in a word of it, paying no attention to most purely scientific communications but being all ears on matter of personality, cutting short the public part of the meeting, which is mainly concerned with the former, in order to be able to prolong the secret session, where the latter can be discussed at leisure, nominating for the examination of memoirs sent by scientists from outside, commissions which will not in fact examine anything, finally between 5 and 6 o'clock going to dinner – this is what [the secretary of the Academy] calls working with the greatest activity.