SCHOOL DAYS IN FRANCE 93 



his city had been converted into prisons and its streets 

 were both unsanitary and unsafe, while in the following 

 year, as we have seen, a mortal plague began to rob 

 the prisons and the guillotine. Many had lost their all 

 in the tempest that swept over them; many more had 

 fled, and public schooling at Nantes must have been at a 

 stand or disorganized for a considerable period. 



Young Audubon could not have tasted much school- 

 ing before the outbreak of the Revolution, when he was 

 seven years old, and but little after it, since this dis- 

 cipline practically terminated in 1802. His passionate 

 love of nature, which was undoubtedly innate, was mani- 

 fested at an early day. Living things of every descrip- 

 tion which he found by the banks of the Loire or along 

 the stonewalls and hedgerows of Coueron gave him the 

 greatest pleasure, but birds were his early favorites. 

 These he soon began to depict with pencil and crayon, 

 but to the dryer discipline of the school he ever turned 

 with laggard feet. 



When the versatile Lord Avebury, who became one 

 of the greatest modern students of the powers of ants 

 and other social insects, was four years old, his mother 

 made this record in her diary: "His great delight is in 

 insects. Butterflies, Caterpillars or Beetles are great 

 treasures, and he is watching a large spider outside my 

 window most anxiously." The same boy at eight, when 

 writing home from school, added this postscript to a 

 letter: "I am a favorite with most of the boys because 

 I do not care about being laughed." The boy who has 

 a good inheritance, follows his own bent, and does "not 

 care about being laughed," may be on the road to success 

 and with talents may achieve distinction. John James 

 Audubon was one of those boys, although his path was 

 never strewn with the roses that many have imagined. 



