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.