92 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
agreeable talents, and he might have stored up much 
had not the continental wars in which France was then 
engaged forced him from school at an early age, when, 
much against his will, he entered the navy as midship- 
man, at Rochefort. This naval experience terminated, 
as he then recorded, in 1802, during the short peace 
between England and France; he was then seventeen 
years of age.’ This was the year following his father’s 
retirement, and the year previous to his first independent 
visit to the United States. 
More details of this early period were given later, 
when the naturalist spoke with great affection of his 
foster mother, to whom his education had been mainly 
entrusted. “Let no one speak of her as my step-moth- 
er,” said he; “I was ever to her as a son of her own flesh 
and blood, and she was to me a true mother.” His every 
idle wish was gratified, he tells us, and his every whim 
indulged, in accordance with the notion that fine clothes 
and full pockets were all that were needed to make the 
gentleman: “She hid my faults, boasted to every one 
of my youthful merits, and, worse than all, said frequent- 
ly in my presence, that I was the handsomest boy in 
France.” 
If Madame Audubon broke the prevailing tradition 
and by going to the other extreme did her best to spoil 
this affectionate boy, some allowance must be made for 
parental over-indulgence. In 1798, when the future 
naturalist was eight years old, the public buildings of 
* Audubon said that he was at the time fourteen years old, which 
could not have been the case, but when writing in 1835 he placed this 
experience at shortly before his return to America, which would have 
been in the winter of 1805-6; “I underwent,” to quote this later account, 
“a mockery of an examination, and was received as a midshipman in the 
navy, went to Rochefort, was placed on board a man-of-war, and ran a 
short cruise. On my return, my father had in some way obtained pass- 
ports for Rozier and me, and we sailed for New York.” 
