JOHN JAMES AUDUBON 3 
beauty. The couple seem to have occu- 
pied for a time a plantation belonging to 
a French Marquis, situated at Mande- 
ville on the North shore of Lake Pont- 
chartrain. Here three sons were born 
to them, of whom John James La Forest 
was the third. The daughter seems to 
have been younger. 
His own mother perished in a slave 
insurrection in St. Domingo, where the 
family had gone to live on the Audubon 
estate at Aux Cayes, when her child was 
but a few months old. Audubon says 
that his father with his plate and money 
and himself, attended by a few faithful 
servants, escaped to New Orleans. What 
became of his sister he does not say, 
though she must have escaped with 
them, since we hear of her existence 
years later. Not long after, how long we 
do not know, the father returned to 
France, where he married a second time, 
giving the son, as he himself says, the 
only mother he ever knew. This woman 
