AUDUBON
THE village of Mandeville in the parish of St. Tammany, Louisiana, is about twenty miles from New Orleans on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain. Here, on the plantation of the same name, owned by the Marquis de Mandeville de Marigny, John James Laforest Audubon[1] was born, the Marquis having lent his home, in the generous southern fashion, to his friend Admiral Jean Audubon, who, with his Spanish Creole wife, lived here some months. In the same house, towards the close of the last century, Louis Philippe found refuge for a time with the ever hospitable Marigny family, and he named the beautiful plantation home "Fontainebleau." Since then changes innumerable have come, the estate has other owners, the house has gone, those who once dwelt there are long dead, their descendants scattered, the old landmarks obliterated.
Audubon has given a sketch of his father in his own words in "Myself," which appears in the pages following; but of his mother little indeed is known. Only within the year, have papers come into the hands of her great-grand-children, which prove her surname to have been Rabin. Audubon himself tells of her tragic death, which was not, however, in the St. Domingo insurrection of 1793, but in one of the local uprisings of the slaves which were of
- ↑ "My name is John James Laforest Audubon. The name Laforest I never sign except when writing to my wife, and she is the only being, since my father's death, who calls me by it." (Letter of Audubon to Mrs. Rathbone, 1827.) All Mrs. Audubon's letters to her husband address him as Laforest.
