lxiv AUDUBON THE NATURALIST 



hated uncle, "Audubon of La Rochelle," and speaks of the oath 

 under which he was bound not to reveal his identity. The name 

 of the Dauphin or Louis XVII does not appear in any of these 

 excerpts, but the reference seems to be clear. 



It should be remembered that when the Dauphin and his 

 mother were separated in the Temple prison on July 3, 1793, 

 the son was in his ninth year, and that the boy was nearly eight 

 years old when his father was executed, so that the young 

 prince had the memory of several years of both his parents, 

 to whom, according to the testimony of all who had known them, 

 he was devotedly attached. 



Mr. Arthur speaks of Miss Harriet Bachman Audubon, 

 daughter of John Woodhouse Audubon by his first wife, telling 

 how she had read in one of her grandfather's journals this 

 significant statement : he made reference to "my father, meaning 

 Jean Audubon, — and in the next sentence said 'my own father 

 whom I saw shot.' He said 'shot,' because he was only eight 

 years old and the word 'to guillotine' was not then invented." 

 Miss Audubon was evidently promoting the idea that the nat- 

 uralist's "own father" was Louis XVI and that her grandfather 

 was the Dauphin ; but if there is any truth in the quotation, it 

 would definitely prove that young Audubon could not have been 

 the Dauphin since the execution of Louis XVI was not witnessed 

 by his own son or by any other member of the royal family. 



In his Ohio and Mississippi journal, writing in 1820, Audu- 

 bon spoke of himself as "a young man of seventeen sent to 

 America to make money," in 1802, as he then thought. It is 

 thus evident that at the age of thirty-five he looked upon 1785 

 as his natal year, although he was a year short in his dating 

 of that first American voyage, which actually occurred in 

 1803, when he was in his eighteenth year. When writing to 

 Bachman in 1832, he gave his own age as forty-seven, which 

 would imply that he was born in 1785, and this would again 

 agree with the date of birth of a child born to Mademoiselle 

 Rabin, as recorded in the Sanson bill. In writing to Bachman 

 again six years later, on April 14, 1838, he speaks of his being 



