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 Couéron 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. 
