AUDUBON 



39 



To speak more fully on some of the incidents which 

 Audubon here relates, I turn to one of the two journals 

 wliich are all that fire has spared of the many volumes 

 which were filled with his fine, rather illegible handwriting 

 previous to 1826. In the earlier of these journals I read: 

 " I went to France not only to escape Da Costa, but even 

 more to obtain my father's consent to my marriage with 

 my Lucy, and this simply because I thought it my moral 

 and religious duty to do so. But although my request 

 was immediately granted, I remained in France nearly two 

 years. As I told you, Mr. Bakewell considered my Lucy 

 too young (she was then but seventeen), and me too un- 

 biisincss-like to marry ; so my father decided that I should 

 remain some months with him, and on returning to 

 America it was his plan to associate me with some one 

 whose commercial knowledge would be of value to me. 



" My father's beautiful country seat, situated within 

 sight of the Loire, about mid-distance between Nantes 

 and the sea, I found quite delightful to my taste, notwith- 

 standing the frightful cruelties I had witnessed in that 

 vicinity, not many years previously. The gardens, green- 

 houses, and all appertaining to it appeared to me then 

 as if of a superior cast; and my father's physician was 

 above all a young man precisely after my own heart ; his 

 name was D'Orbigny, and with his young wife and infant 

 son he lived not far distant. The doctor was a good 

 fisherman, a good hunter, and fond of all objects in nature. 

 Together we searched the woods, the fields, and the banks 

 of the Loire, procuring every bird we could, and I made 

 drawings of every one of them — very bad, to be sure, 

 but still they were of assistance to me. The lessons which 

 I had received from the great David ^ now proved all- 

 important to me, but what I wanted, and what I had the 

 good fortune to stumble upon a few years later, was the 



' Jacques Louis David (1748-1825), court painter to Louis XVL and 

 afterwards to Napoleon I. 



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