' THE ENIGMA OF AUDUBON’S LIFE 271 
chelle,” who is said to have been a politician. In some 
of the passages which we do not quote, the naturalist 
would have his family believe that he was of noble birth, 
that his adoptive father was not his true father, and 
that both he and Lieutenant Audubon had received 
irremediable injury through the treachery of the mys- 
terious uncle, “Audubon of La Rochelle.” Now these 
strange statements of the naturalist, though not in 
accord with the facts as they are known to us, should be 
interpreted, I believe, in the light of possible stories that 
may have come to him in the glamour of his -youth; his 
mind may have been diverted by them, he may have 
believed them, but of this nothing now can positively 
be known. To continue our conjectures, it is possible 
that the plain conflict between these supposititious tales 
and the facts that were revealed at his adoption, his 
baptism, and in the wills of his father and stepmother, 
as well as by the lawsuit which followed the former’s 
death, all led him to resort to “enigma.” We should 
also remember that the naturalist, who was careless of 
dates and historical facts, had finally left his home at 
the age of twenty, when young men as a rule are not 
curious about their family history, and that he reached 
the reminiscent stage late in life. It seems probable 
that the wording of his father’s will and the later at- 
tempt to annul it finally induced him to wash his hands 
of the whole matter, even to breaking off relations with 
his family in France. Feeling, as undoubtedly he did, 
that public knowledge of those conditions, for which 
he was in no way responsible, might be a bar to all 
future aspirations, he was not loath to let the matter 
rest, so far as he and his immediate family were con- 
cerned, under a cloak of mystery. If such were in truth. 
15 See Note, Vol. I, p. 27. 
