FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxix 



different houses during a long intermittent residence; and he 

 continued to live there with his family until his retirement from 

 the navy for disability on January 1, 1801, when he settled in 

 his country villa, "La Gerbetiere," at Coueron, on the right 

 bank of the Loire nine miles down the river. 



During this earlier time, up to his sixteenth year, young 

 Audubon had received little or no regular schooling, but he 

 had enjoyed a good deal of desultory experience in natural 

 history and drawing. Thereafter, from 1801 to 1803, when 

 he first returned to America, and for a year or more in 1805 

 and 1806, when he was at Coueron, aside from slight digres- 

 sions, he was roaming the countryside and making a collection 

 of his own drawings of the native birds. According to his own 

 account of these formative years, he received plenty of good 

 advice, criticism, and admonition from his father, and it was 

 at Coueron that Fougere first met Dr. Charles d'Orbigny, who 

 might be called his father in natural history. For my part 

 I do not see the need of doubting the identity of the youth 

 whose life has been briefly sketched from 1789 to 1803. If 

 this was Audubon, who up to his eighteenth year had spent 

 nearly five years in Santo Domingo, eleven years in Nantes, 

 and parts of two years at Coueron, where does the Bourbon 

 prince enter the picture? 



Miss Rourke thinks that Lieutenant Audubon did not tell 

 all of his reasons for sending his son to the United States, and 

 that "whatever his reasons were, they persisted, and may have 

 had to do with the boy's parentage." This is unimportant, 

 since what the father did not tell, the son apparently did. In 

 writing to Miers Fisher in 1803 and to Francis Da Costa in 

 the winter of 1804-05, Lieutenant Audubon expressly said that 

 the compelling reasons for sending his son to America at that 

 time were to enable him to learn English and to enter trade. 

 "Remember, my dear Sir," the elder Audubon wrote, "I expect 

 that if your plan [with the lead mine] succeeds, my son will 

 find a place in the works, which will enable him to provide for 

 himself, in order to spare me from expenses which I can with 



