The Sickly Cryptogam  

"'One day' (so wrote Méryon to Mr. Burty after having read the notice of his work in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts), ‘in one of the walks which I used to take in order to pass the time at the end of our sojourn at Akaroa, where we were placed to protect the French whalers, I saw in the corner of a wood of lofty forest trees this poor little fungus. Its ephemeral existence probably only dated back to the morning which had followed a rainy night. Distorted in form and pinched and puny from its birth, I could not but pity it. It seemed to me so entirely typical of the inclemency, and at the same time the whimsicality, of an incomplete and sickly creation, that I could not deny it a corner in my "souvenirs de voyage," and so I drew it carefully, intending some time or other to introduce it into one of my Akaroa subjects.'"--Charles Méryon, Sailor, Engraver, and Etcher (1879) by Burty