FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxxi 



Both Antoine and Fenimore were in Paris seventeen years. 

 Some have thought that the name of La Foret (La Forest or 

 Laforest), which Audubon assumed for a time in his early life, 

 was a fanciful one ; but according to Judge Fougere, as noticed 

 also by Mr. Arthur, Mademoiselle d'Obcent-Dumont, who be- 

 came the wife of Belony Fougere, was descendant of a family 

 bearing that name and having plantations at Jeremie. The 

 La Forests living there to-day all have Negro blood. 



VII 



If Audubon had been the son of Louis XVI and Marie 

 Antoinette, is it possible to believe that he would have been 

 sent to Paris, probably in 1802, when the world had been "on 

 fire with his pursuit," to study under Jacques Louis David, 

 famous artist and Conventional regicide, who had voted to send 

 his father to the guillotine, who had visited the son when a 

 prisoner in the Temple, presumably with the intention of paint- 

 ing or drawing his portrait, and who had actually sketched the 

 pathetic figure of his brave mother when on her way to the 

 scaffold ? 



This reference to Marie Antoinette suggests another critical 

 scene in the life of this young queen, who had grown old while 

 still in her thirties. On that desolate winter morning of Janu- 

 ary 21, 1793, in Paris, in an upper room of the Templars' 

 Tower, were gathered a stricken wife and mother, the Princess 

 Elizabeth, familiarly known as "Aunt Babet," and the two 

 royal children, Marie Therese Charlotte and Monsieur Charles, 

 the Dauphin of France, in the presence only of their two 

 watchdogs, the commissioners who were daily detailed from the 

 Convention, and their faithful pantry boy, Turgy. In a set 

 of significant questions that this last-named youth, when grown 

 to manhood, sent to the spurious pretender "Charles de 

 Navarre," in 1817, was this: "What took place on January 21, 

 when the cannon were heard in that upper room? What did 

 your aunt say at that instant, and what unusual thing was 



