CHAPTER VI

School Days In France

Molding of Audubon's character—Factor of environment—Turning failure into success—An indulgent stepmother—The truant—His love of nature—Early drawings and discipline—Experience at Rochefort—Baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.

It is now commonly believed that of the three great factors which mold character—environment, training and heritage, the last is the most important, since it alone is predetermined and unalterable. Environment may be uncertain or unsuitable, training defective or deferred, but blood is the one possession of which the child cannot be robbed; and since it sets the limits to possibility, in no small degree must it determine the acquisitions and accomplishments of a lifetime. This, however, is not the whole truth. Race may account for much, but it does not account for everything; the child is effectually robbed whenever it is not permitted to realize to the full upon its inheritance. To be able to convert possibilities into actualities it must receive fit training and right incentives, and if at critical times the proper spur is wanting, its patrimony may be sadly wasted. The "good environment" for the youth, too often thought to be the soft conditions of an easy life, is in truth that only which provides the proper and necessary stimulus. This may be now fear or pride, now hard necessity or bitter want; again, an awakened sense of responsibility or ambition to excel may be induced by concrete examples and fostered, as it often is, by lofty purposes and the uplift of a high ideal.

Audubon's life affords a striking proof of the power which environment can exert in awakening dormant capacity, in developing talents to their full and calling into use every force held in reserve. When we consider what his life work finally became, and what he eventually accomplished in a field for which he had no training, except in drawing, we find it easier to wonder at the man than to criticize him. With a formal schooling in France of the slenderest sort, in which the writing of his own language was never completely mastered, at eighteen he came to America and adopted a new tongue, which he first heard from the Quakers. Twenty years more were to elapse before he had a definite plan,—during which his environment was mainly that of a trader and storekeeper in the backwoods, never remote from the white man's frontier, hardly the soil one would seek for the development of budding talents in art, literature or science. Failure in trade was one of the spurs which started Audubon on his ultimate career, for it led to the immediate development of the talents which he possessed; the encouragement which he received from his wife was undoubtedly another. When he finally emerged, like a somewhat wild but well ripened fruit, at the age of forty, rich in experience, ready to absorb what from lack of earlier motives or opportunities he had failed to acquire, and with the determination to succeed, he won recognition as much through his personality and enthusiasm as by his extraordinary versatility and talents.

In an early sketch of his life Audubon said that his father had given both him and his sister an education appropriate to his purse; his teachers were possessed of 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 midshipman, 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.[78] 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-mother," 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 frequently 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 1793, when the future naturalist was eight years old, the public buildings of 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 schooling before the outbreak of the Revolution, when he was seven years old, and but little after it, since this discipline practically terminated in 1802. His passionate love of nature, which was undoubtedly innate, was manifested at an early day. Living things of every description which he found by the banks of the Loire or along the stonewalls and hedgerows of Couëron 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.

The naturalist tells us that his father hoped that he would follow in his footsteps, or else become an engineer, and he saw that his son was instructed in the elements of mathematics, geography, fencing and music. But as Lieutenant Audubon was continually on the move, supervision in those matters fell to the over-indulgent stepmother, with the result that, instead of doing his duties at school, young Audubon took to the fields. Every night, he said, he would return with his lunch basket well laden with the spoils of the day—birds' nests, eggs, and curiosities of every sort destined for the museum into which his room had already been transformed. He was then in the "collecting stage," when that sense of possession dominates the heart of the boy, which, if well directed, can be turned to excellent account.

Lieutenant Audubon encouraged his son's taste for natural history and for drawing, but did not regard such accomplishments as a substitute for what he considered more serious subjects. He himself had suffered too much from lack of a formal education and was resolved to give his children the best opportunities within their reach. "Revolutions," he once remarked, according to his son, "were not confined to society, but could also take place in the lives of individuals," when they were all "too apt to lose in one day the fortune they had before possessed; but talents and knowledge, added to sound mental training, assisted by honest industry," could "never fail, nor be taken from any one when once the possessor of such valuable means."

When the elder Audubon returned from one of his periodic cruises, "my room," said the naturalist, "made quite a show," and the father complimented him on his good taste; but upon being questioned in regard to the progress made in his other studies, he could only hang his head in silence. His sister Rosa, on the contrary, who was also called to account, was warmly commended upon the improvement shown in her musical exercises. The next morning at dawn a carriage was drawn up before the Audubon door, and with the father and son, together with the latter's trunk and violin, was soon proceeding in the direction of Rochefort. The sailor had laid his plans and was about to execute them in his own way. Presently, said the son, his father drew forth a book and began to read, thus leaving him to his own resources. In this way they traveled for a number of days, not an unnecessary word being spoken during the entire journey, until the walls of Rochefort had been passed, and they alighted at the door of the father's house in that city. When they had entered, the naturalist continues, "my father bade me sit by his side, and taking one of my hands, calmly said to me: 'My beloved boy, thou art now safe. I have brought thee here that I may be able to pay constant attention to thy studies; thou shalt have ample time for pleasures, but the remainder _must_ be employed with industry and care. This day is entirely thine, and as I must attend to my duties, if thou wishest to see the docks, the fine ships-of-war, and walk around the wall, thou mayest accompany me.'"

The youth accepted his father's proposal with good grace, and was presented to the officers whom they met, but he soon found that he was like a prisoner of war on parade. He was enrolled at once in the military school, where he was placed under the immediate care of Gabriel Loyen du Puigaudeau, his future brother-in-law. It was not long, however, before young Audubon gave his guardian the slip; he jumped from the window of his prison and made for the gardens of the Marine Secrétariat, but a corporal, whom he had recognized as a friend, suddenly nipped his plans in the bud; he was ordered, he said, aboard a pontoon, then lying in port, and there was obliged to remain until his father, who was absent at the time, finally released him, "not without a severe reprimand." The following record, written long after, is reminiscent of this period: "This day twenty-one years since I was at Rochefort in France. I spent most of the day at copying letters of my father to the Minister of the Navy.... What has happened to me since would fill a volume.... This day, January first, 1821, I am on a keel boat going down to New Orleans, the poorest man on it."

Audubon's stay at Rochefort, the date of which is no doubt correctly given in the journal just quoted, was destined to be short. After a year he returned to Nantes, and later to "La Gerbetière," where as before he spent all of his leisure in roaming the fields and looking for birds, their nests, their eggs and their young. At about this time, when fifteen years of age, Audubon began to make a collection of his original drawings of French birds, which was greatly extended in 1805 and 1806.

He has recorded that at the behest of his foster mother, who was an ardent Catholic, he was confirmed in that Church when "within a few months of being seventeen years old"; he was surprised and indifferent, but "took to the catechism, studied it and other matters pertaining to the ceremony, and all was performed to her liking." Since no record of this act has been found, it is probable that the ceremony in question was confused with that of his baptism, which, as we have noticed, occurred on October 23, 1800, six months before he attained his sixteenth birthday.

After having seen something of the character of Audubon's early training in France, it will not be surprising to find that when, at the age of forty-five, he first seriously began to write for publication and in English, which was not his mother tongue, he found himself handicapped in many ways. In after life he wrote that the only school which he had ever attended was that of Adversity, and that his tuition there had been of a prolonged and elaborate character. Though this statement was made under the stress of present feeling, it was not wholly devoid of truth.