264 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
ever had a better, nor more loving one.”* Again in 
1828 he spoke of this estimable woman as if she were 
then alive, although she had been dead seven years. 
In Madame Audubon’s last will, which was made in 
the July preceding her death, she left her property to 
be equally divided between her two adopted children, 
“Mr. Jean Audubon, called Jean Rabin, husband of 
Lucy Bakewell, and who I believe is at present in the 
United States of America, and to Rose Bouffard, wife 
of M. Gabriel Loyen du Puigaudeau, my son-in-law, 
who is living at Couéron”; she also took care to guard 
against the pretensions of any spurious heirs, and to 
make provision for her grandchildren in case of the 
death of either or both of her heirs direct. 
Having given the precise, if somewhat prosaic, re- 
corded facts of the case, we will quote the story nar- 
rated by the naturalist’s biographers, who never could 
have seen the legal documents and who thus had only 
hearsay and conjecture on which to build: 
At this juncture [of critical business affairs at Henderson], 
the father of Audubon died; but for some unfortunate cause 
he did not receive legal notice for more than a year. On be- 
coming acquainted with the fact he traveled to Philadelphia to 
obtain funds, but was unsuccessful. His father had left him his 
property in France of La Gibitére [Gerbetiére], and seven- 
teen thousand dollars which had been deposited with a mer- 
chant in Richmond, Virginia. Audubon, however, took no steps 
to obtain possession of his estate in France, and in after years, 
when his sons had grown up, sent one of them to France, for 
the purpose of legally transferring the property to his own 
sister Rosa. The merchant who held possession of the seventeen 
thousand dollars would not deliver them up until Audubon 
~ *Maria R. Audubon, dudubon and his Journals (Bibl. No. 86), vol. i, 
pp. iii and 130. 
