FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lix 



her wishes and those of her sister, Miss Florence Audubon, they 

 were only briefly referred to in my biography of their grand- 

 father in 1917. In the course of our conversation, Miss Maria 

 confessed that she had really never known who her grandfather 

 was, but that in the light of these journal entries she had come 

 to think that he was — or, perhaps she said, might have been — 

 the lost Dauphin. In commenting on this question, Miss Audu- 

 bon added that a gentleman to whom these extracts had been 

 shown had said that possibly they had been written to obscure 

 the unwelcome fact of illegitimacy, a wise remark, as the sequel 

 has shown. I tried to dissuade Miss Audubon from her ex- 

 pressed intention of destroying the original manuscript, but to 

 no avail. 



The entries in this note-book, which form the basis of Mrs. 

 Tyler's / Who Should Command All, have recently been pub- 

 lished by Stanley Clisby Arthur in his careful biography. 2 

 Mrs. Tyler says that I have "not recorded one biographical 

 event between the year 1794, the date of Audubon's adoption, 

 and 1800, the date of his baptism," and tries to put young 

 Audubon in "Selkirk's Settlements," in Canada, at some time 

 between these early years. All of these questions will be taken 

 up later. 



H 



In 1914, at the very outbreak of the World War, a great 

 flock of documents pertaining to Lieutenant Audubon and his 

 family was discovered at Coueron, the seat of his country villa 

 in France. Outstanding among them was the curious bill of 

 Jean Audubon's family physician, Doctor Sanson, of Les Cayes, 

 Santo Domingo, covering a period of nearly three years, 1783 

 to 1786. 3 This is particularly remarkable for recording the 

 birth of a child to Mademoiselle Rabin on April 26, 1785. The 



2 See Audubon: An Intimate Life of the American Woodsman (Bibl. 

 No. 264). 



3 See the reproduction of this bill in Chapter IV, and for translation, 

 Appendix I. 



