The modest château stands a few rods to the westward of the little village, and was evidently the seat of the leading family of the place. It faces east and is a two-storied house of the shape seen everywhere in France, with its high, incurved roof; the walls, nearly a foot and a half thick, built of brick; the corners and windows of blocks of white limestone. It is about fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Above the roof formerly rose a small tower. There is no porch over the front door. Within, a rather narrow hall passes through the centre, and opens into a large room on each side. What was evidently the drawing-room or salon was a spacious apartment with a low white wainscot and a heavy cornice. Over the large, roomy fireplace is a painting on the wood panel, representing a rural scene, in which a shepherdess and her lover are engaged in other occupations than the care of the flock of sheep visible in the distance. Over the doorway is a smaller but quaint painting of the same description. The house is uninhabited, and perhaps uninhabitable—indeed almost a ruin—and is used as a storeroom for wood and rubbish by the peasants in the adjoining house to the left, on the south.
The ground in front was cultivated with vegetables, not laid down to a lawn, and the land stretched back for perhaps three hundred to four hundred feet between the old garden walls.
Here, amid these rural scenes, even now so beautiful and tranquil, the subject of our sketch was born and lived through his infancy and early boyhood.[1]
If his parents did not possess an ample fortune, they were blessed with a numerous progeny, for Lamarck was the eleventh and youngest child, and seems to have survived all the others. Biographers have differed as to the date of the birth of Lamarck.[2] Happily the exact date had been ascertained through the researches of M. Philippe Salmon; and M. Duval kindly showed us in the thin volume of records, with its tattered and torn leaves, the register of the Acte de Naissance, and made a copy of it, as follows:
Extrait du Registre aux Actes de Baptême de la Commune de Bazentin, pour l’Année 1744.
L’an mil sept cent quarante-quatre, le premier août est né en légitime mariage et le lendemain a été baptisé par moy curé soussigné Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine, fils de Messire Jacques Philippe de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, seigneur des Bazentin grand et petit et de haute et puissante Dame Marie Françoise de Fontaine demeurant en leur château de Bazentin le petit, son parrain a été Messire Jean Baptiste de Fossé, prêtre-chanoine de l’église collégiale de St. Farcy de Péronne, y demeurant, sa marraine Dame Antoinette Françoise de Bucy, nièce de Messire Louis Joseph Michelet, chevalier, ancien commissaire de l’artillerie de France demeurante au château de Guillemont, qui ont signé avec mon dit sieur de Bazentin et nous.
Ont signé: De Fossé, De Bucy Michelet, Bazentin. Cozette, curé.
From a photograph
ACT OF BIRTH
Of Lamarck’s parentage and ancestry there are fortunately some traces. In the Registre aux Actes de Baptême pour l’Année 1702, still preserved in the mairie of Bazentin-le-Petit, the record shows that his father was born in February, 1702, at Bazentin. The infant was baptised February 16, 1702, the permission to the curé by Henry, Bishop of Amiens, having been signed February 3, 1702. Lamarck’s grandparents were, according to this certificate of baptism, Messire Philippe de Monet de Lamarck, Ecuyer, Seigneur des Bazentin, and Dame Magdeleine de Lyonne.