lxvi AUDUBON THE NATURALIST 



he wrote: "To-day, as I was shaving, I was struck by my re- 

 semblance to my father, not my adopted father, but my own 

 father." 



Those committed to the Dauphin theory see in Audubon's 

 features a strong Bourbon likeness, but such fancied resem- 

 blances never carry much weight. Rev. John Halloway Han- 

 son, 8 biographer and protagonist of Eleazar Williams, was 

 certain that this half-breed Indian was an aristocrat, and the 

 Dauphin to boot, for he had the Bourbon features from top to 

 toe. 



In writing to young Spencer Fullerton Baird in 1842, 

 Audubon expressed the curious, if purely fanciful, idea that 

 his mother once lived on his father's "Mill Grove" farm, which 

 was near Norristown in Pennsylvania. 



The foregoing record probably does not exhaust all the 

 possibilities, but it is amazing enough, and partly explains why 

 John Neal was so often taunting Audubon for having as many 

 birthplaces as the poet Homer. A remarkable fact about these 

 statements is that nearly all of them come to us at second 

 hand, that is, from private letters or edited journals, the 

 quotations from the Ornithological Biography being the only 

 ones that were published under Audubon's own signature. 



From the account just given, it is obvious, I think, that 

 Audubon was determined that the facts concerning his birth 

 and parentage should not be made public, and that to achieve 

 this end he resorted to enigma, as the best available smoke- 

 screen. If he thought that public knowledge of those facts 

 would prove a stumbling-block in his own career, and in that 

 of his two sons, whom he once said he hoped might rise to 

 eminence, he was indubitably right ; for strange as it may seem, 

 and unjust as it assuredly is, the stigma of illegitimacy has 

 long been a penalty which the public is ever ready to place on 



8 Author of The Lost Prince (New York, 1854). With this book, said 

 William W. Wight, the habit began of referring to Louis XVII as "lost," 

 as if he had been mislaid or hidden. "He was lost only in the sense that 

 he had died." Hanson's mother was a daughter of a younger brother of 

 Oliver Goldsmith, the poet. 



