Chapter 10
What Will Jean Do?
“They are nothing but a family of cripples!” cried Jean, almost in tears. “They are stiff and dead and ugly, and their tails look glued on and ready to fall off!”
He was looking at the pictures which he had made during the past year. Some people might have thought them good for a young boy, but they did not satisfy Jean.
“They do not look quite right, but give yourself time, my boy,” said Captain Audubon, who was in the room with his son. Then he added hopefully, “You do very well indeed with the claws. See how the sharp toes of that blackbird are buried in the green corn blade. They are as natural as life!”
Jean nodded. Feet were easy for him, but tails were very hard. No matter how hard he tried, he was never satisfied with the tails.
A little while later his sister came out to the back court, sniffing in distaste. “What in the world are you burning, Jean, that makes such a disagreeable smell?”
“I am burning up a family of cripples,” answered Jean sadly, stirring the bit of charred paper which was all that remained of a whole year’s drawings.
“Tomorrow I will begin all over,” he went on. “I will work hard on their tails. I will get them right, Sister. They will be mine forever!”
Rose sighed, shook her head, and walked away. Jean stayed to watch the last picture curl into a bit of black ember.
The next day was a much happier one for Jean. In fact, it was a day which stood out in his life like a great torch.
A visitor from North America came to call on the Audubons.
Captain Audubon owned many properties. Besides the plantation in Haiti, the house in Nantes, and the farm near Saint Nazaire, he also owned a substantial piece of land in North America.
Jean was out in the courtyard, busy with his fencing lesson, when the servant called him that morning.
“The Captain wishes to see you in the drawing room!” the servant announced. Jean laid down the slim blade of shining steel with which he had been practicing, and ran into the house. In the library was a stranger who did not look like a Frenchman.
“This is Mr. Dacosta. He comes from North America. I thought you would like to hear something about that wild, faraway country.”
Mr. Dacosta smiled and began telling about the riches of the land, the great farms, the vast forests covering miles and miles of ground.
“Are there birds in those forests?” Jean asked eagerly.
“Uncounted millions of birds, my boy—birds of the most splendid plumage and graceful flight. They gather in multitudes. There are birds called passenger pigeons which cover the whole sky, like a blanket of smoke!”
Before the wide eyes of the boy, he opened a trunk. He took from it an enormous feather.
“This is the feather of the American eagle, or the bird of Washington, as it is often called.”
Jean held the great feather in his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the bird which would have feathers like this. His heart beat madly.
“You would love the parakeets,” the man went on. “They are bright and cheerful. The woods are full of them in some places. I have brought one to show you.” He took out a stuffed bird. It was bright green, with a red and yellow head and a hooked beak.
Jean remembered something he had almost forgotten—white sunshine on blinding blue water, a fringe of green cane in which laborers stooped and cut, a ghostly veil of mosquito netting fluttering about his bed, and outside, in the mango trees, the brilliant parrots of Haiti.
“Father, I want to go to North America!” he cried, and Mr. Dacosta smiled.
“It is a good land for young men,” he said. “It is a land of power and riches.”
Jean shook his head. “I do not want the power and I do not want the riches. I want the birds. I want to see them and follow them and touch them. I want to put them down on paper and make them live for always!”
Had he said all this before? He had completely forgotten the promise he had made to the chattering trogons and parrots on that long-past morning in Haiti.
But he knew that more than anything in the world, he wanted to see and to draw the birds of this strange, far-off North America.
Jean turned fourteen in 1799. He was a tall, slender boy with light brown hair and sparkling brown eyes. His radiant smile had not changed very much from the smile that had first won the heart of his beloved stepmother. His father worried that he was not learning what he needed to become a captain or engineer. And so one day, his father took him on a long journey to the town of Rochefort.
It was a rather grim-looking town, built on the side of a rocky hill. Jean had often heard of Rochefort. It was a military town with a naval school. The Captain had a house in the officers’ section.
They entered this house. It was very different from the crowded picture-book rooms back in Nantes, or the luxurious country house at Couëron. This was a man’s place, bare and stern. Two ship models on the mantel were the only decoration in the room.
“Sit down, my boy,” said the Captain, pointing to one of the stiff chairs. When Jean had obeyed, his father said, “My beloved boy, you are now safe. I have brought you here that I may be able to pay constant attention to your studies. Here you shall have enough time for pleasures, but the remainder must be employed with industry and care!”
“Yes, Father,” said Jean good-naturedly.
The Captain went on, “This day is entirely yours. As I must attend to my duties, you may go with me if you wish and see the docks, the fine ships of war, and the other sights.”
“Yes, Father,” said the boy again.
Here he saw no green sandpipers or red-legged stilt birds or curlews hunting food by the water. Here he saw only the tall men-of-war crowding the dock, and officers and sailors and young military students.
“Head up, chin out, stomach in!” roared the young officer, Gabriel Dupuy Gaudeau. He hit Jean a fierce blow between the shoulders to make him straighten up.
“Right, left, right, left,” he ordered. The young students were on parade.
Captain Audubon had gone away on another trip, but he had enrolled his son in the military school before he left.
Jean did not like the military school. It seemed to him that the young officer was always finding fault with him.
To Jean, time dragged by horribly here in the Rochefort school. When spring began to come, Jean felt he could bear it no longer. “Now I know how birds feel when they are shut up in cages,” he thought, staring out the window of his bare room into the garden of the Marine Secretary.
Suddenly his heart leaped. Was that a swallow out in the garden—a swallow here in this grim place of ships, docks, and soldiers?
Yes, it was a swallow! He had listened too many times to be mistaken. The swallow was back from the south, and it was calling him.
A terrible homesickness came over him. He could close his eyes and see the marshy fields of Nantes with the long-legged beach birds wading about. He could hear the thrushes in the orange trees. He could feel the remembered sunshine of the Couëron meadows.
Outside his door in the hall, Dupuy Gaudeau kept guard. But there were other ways of getting out.
Jean slipped from the window, landed on the ground, and headed for the Marine Secretary’s garden.
“Halt!” A young corporal stopped him suddenly. “You are running away! You will be reported for this, Jean Jacques Audubon! There is a grave punishment for such behavior!”
Jean never forgot the miserable days he spent aboard a prison ship, waiting for his father to return. He never forgot the look on his father’s face when the Captain came after him, and he never forgot the stern words of the Captain.
He did not try to run away any more. He finished his year of training and came home, looking quite smart in his military uniform. But he never went back to Rochefort. (Figure 10.1)
Figure 10.1: Jean slipped from the window, landed on the ground, and headed for the Marine Secretary’s garden..
Back at Couëron, Jean was able to spend all his time and thought making the pictures he loved. He was learning to use paints and water colors, too, so that his pictures now looked more alive.
He was no longer bothered by the hated mathematics lessons. Captain Audubon had decided that his son was not cut out to be a naval officer or an engineer.
Always, when his father came home, Jean showed him the best of the pictures. The Captain looked at them carefully, now and then giving a few words of kind advice.
One day the Captain called Jean into his study. There was a thoughtful look on his face, and the boy’s heart beat faster. Was he going to be sent back to Rochefort, that place he hated?
“Have you thought any more about your future, my boy?” asked the Captain kindly. “You are past sixteen now. I believe it is time you chose your life work.”
“I have chosen it, Father,” answered Jean quickly. “I want to be an artist and draw pictures of birds.”
The Captain sighed. This was not what he had wanted for his only son. But he was wise enough to know that fathers cannot always plan what their children should do.
“Very well, then,” he said. “If you wish to choose painting for your life work, you must have a good teacher. We must make arrangements for you to go to Paris.”
“To Paris!” Jean cried. Paris was the capital and the most exciting city in France.
“Jacques Louis David has his studio there. He will take you as a pupil.”
So young Audubon set forth on a journey, to try to capture the desire of his heart. His hopes were high. Monsieur David was one of the most famous and gifted French artists.
“Perhaps he will teach me to paint in oils, and how to show the blue-green shine of a purple grackle’s throat and the shimmer of August sun on green corn!”
Jean was disappointed, however.
“Certainly not, young sir,” returned the artist to his question. “You are not ready for oils. You must go into the beginner’s class and study drawing from a plaster cast.”
“I want to draw animals and birds,” cried Jean despairingly when he looked about at his models. They were great plaster casts of giant eyes and noses, and of ancient statues.
He wrote to Captain Audubon. “I do not want to draw great statues and long-dead giants, dear Father. I am afraid that Paris is not for me. I would rather spend my time in the woods and fields with birds for my companions.”
Captain Audubon read these words as he sat in his study at Couëron. He had been reading his letters and looking over his accounts.
And then he raised his head. Was it only his imagination, or did he really hear Jean’s voice down in the drawing room?
In the next minute there was a quick rush of footsteps up the stairs—for Jean never walked up stairways. There was a rapid knock at the door, and in a minute the stout sea captain’s breath was nearly squeezed out of him in Jean’s eager hug.
“Jean, why are you home now? Is there a holiday? Is Monsieur David ill?”
“Oh, I have left Monsieur David’s studio, Father. Those monstrous eyes and noses and dead statues gave me nightmares!”
Jean laughed. He did not look like a person who was bothered with nightmares. His eyes sparkled, and his long curly hair shone like silk. He was tall and slender and glowing with good health and happiness.
“It is good to see you again, my boy,” said the Captain. “But what are you planning to do now that you have left Monsieur David?”
“First of all, I am going to take a long walk in the fields,” Jean answered. “I am sure I can catch a green viper, and I may even find some turtle’s eggs to add to my collection.”
He put his arm through his father’s. “Come with me,” he coaxed. “Forget these musty accounts and dreary letters. Maman will have a picnic basket packed for us. We will spend the day together in the fields.”
Captain Audubon had always found it hard to say no to his son, and before long the two of them were walking together along the hedgerows of Couëron. They carried a well-packed basket of food between them.
Suddenly Jean stood still, listening and looking. From a hedge came the cries of birds. Jean pointed. “See those wrens? They are a father and a mother, and they seem to be worried about something!”
Quick and silent as a cat, he darted to the hedge. The little parent wrens flew off, scolding and crying. Jean parted the leaves and looked.
In a minute he beckoned to the Captain. He was smiling broadly.
“The poor little wrens do not know what to do,” he said, as the Captain came near. “They have hatched a cuckoo in their nest!”
There in the middle of the tiny wren’s nest, between the two wren babies, was a much larger bird, which had just hatched. The halves of its broken shell were still in the nest, and it was howling for food already.
“No wonder the poor little wrens are puzzled,” laughed Jean. “This queer bird doesn’t seem like one of theirs. They don’t know how to treat him!”
The Captain looked at the little wren parents, chattering in worried voices a few feet away.
Jean was looking happy and excited. “It is not often that you can find where the cuckoos have put their eggs,” he said. “They are sly about hiding them. What wonderful luck to find one after it has hatched! I shall come down here every day and watch what happens!”
The Captain sighed. He felt he could sympathize with those bird parents, fluttering and puzzling over their strange child. Sometimes it seemed to him that he and Mrs. Audubon had a cuckoo in their own nest.