in 1707 he obtained the title of engraver to the king, Louis XIV., who allowed him a pension, with apartments in the Gobelins; and the following year he was made a member of the Royal Academy. He was eighty years of age before he quitted the graver, and nearly ninety when he died. The best prints of this artist are those which appear not so pleasing to the eye at first sight. In these the etching constitutes a great part; and he has finished them in a bold, rough style. The “Rape of the Sabines,” after Poussin, is considered his masterpiece.
AUDRAN, EDMOND (1842–1901), French musical composer, was born at Lyons on the 11th of April 1842. He studied music at the École Niedermeyer, where he won the prize for composition in 1859. Two years later he accepted the post of organist of the church of St Joseph at Marseilles. He made his first appearance as a dramatic composer at Marseilles with L’Ours et le Pacha (1862), a musical version of one of Scribe’s vaudevilles. This was followed by La Chercheuse d’Esprit (1864), a comic opera, also produced at Marseilles. Audran wrote a funeral march on the death of Meyerbeer, which was performed with some success, and made various attempts to win fame as a writer of sacred music. He produced a mass (Marseilles, 1873), an oratorio, La Sulamite (Marseilles, 1876), and numerous minor works, but he is known almost entirely as a composer of the lighter forms of opera. His first Parisian success was made with Les Noces d’Olivette (1879), a work which speedily found its way to London and (as Olivette) ran for more than a year at the Strand theatre (1880–1881). Audran’s music has, in fact, met with as much favour in England as in France, and all save a few of his works have been given in a more or less adapted form in London theatres. Besides those already mentioned, the following have been the most undeniably successful of Audran’s many comic operas: Le Grand Mogol (Marseilles, 1876; Paris, 1884; London, as The Grand Mogul, 1884), La Mascotte (Paris, 1880; London, as The Mascotte, 1881), Gillette de Narbonne (Paris, 1882; London, as Gillette, 1883), La Cigale et la Fourmi (Paris, 1886; London, as La Cigale, 1890), Miss Hélyett (Paris, 1890; London, as Miss Decima 1891), La Poupée (Paris, 1896; London, 1897). Audran was one of the best of the successors of Offenbach. He had little of Offenbach’s humour, but his music is distinguished by an elegance and a refinement of manner which lift it above the level of opéra bouffe to the confines of genuine opéra comique. He was a fertile if not a very original melodist, and his orchestration is full of variety, without being obtrusive or vulgar. Many of his operas, La Mascotte in particular, reveal a degree of musicianship which is rarely associated with the ephemeral productions of the lighter stage. He died in Paris on the 16th of August 1901.
AUDREHEM, ARNOUL D’ (c. 1305–1370), French soldier, was born at Audrehem, in the present department of Pas de Calais, near St Omer. Nothing is known of his career before 1332, when he is heard of at the court of the king of France. Between 1335 and 1342 he went three times to Scotland to aid King David Bruce in his wars. In 1342 he became captain for the king of France in Brittany; then he seems to have served in the household of the duke of Normandy, and in 1346, as one of the main defenders of Calais, was taken as a prisoner to England by Edward III. From 1349 he holds an important place in the military history of France, first as captain in Angoulême, and from June 1351, in succession to the lord of Beaujeu, as marshal of France. In March 1352 he was appointed lieutenant for the king in the territory between the Loire and the Dordogne, in June 1353 in Normandy, and in 1355 in Artois, Picardy and the Boulonnais. It was Audrehem who arrested Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, and his partisans, at the banquet given by the dauphin at Rouen in 1356. At Poitiers he was one of those who advised King John to attack the English, and, charging in the front line of the French army, was slightly wounded and taken prisoner. From England he was several times given safe-conducts to France, and he took an active part in the negotiations for the treaty of Bretigny, recovering his liberty the same time as King John. In 1361, as the king’s lieutenant in Languedoc, he prevented the free companies from seizing the castles, and negotiated the treaty with their chiefs under which they followed Henry, count of Trastamara (later Henry II. of Castile), into Spain. In 1365 he himself joined du Guesclin in the expedition to Spain, was taken prisoner with him by the Black Prince at the battle of Najera (1367), and was unable to pay his ransom until 1369. In 1368, on account of his age, he was relieved of the office of marshal, being appointed bearer of the oriflamme, with a pension of 2000 livres. He was sent to Spain in 1370 by Charles V., to urge his friend du Guesclin to return to France, and in spite of his age he took part in the battle of Pontvallain (December 1370), but fell ill and died, probably at Saumur, in the latter part of December 1370.
See Émile Molinier, “Étude sur la vie d’Arnoul d’Audrehem, maréchal de France,” in Mémoires présentés par divers savants à l’académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2e série, iv. (1883).
AUDUBON, JOHN JAMES (1780–1851), American naturalist, is said to have been born on the 5th of May 1780 in Louisiana, his father being a French naval officer and his mother a Spanish Creole. He was educated in Paris, where he had lessons from the painter, J. L. David. Returning to America in 1798 he settled on a farm near Philadelphia, and gave himself up to the study of natural history, and especially to drawing birds. In 1826 he went to England in the hope of getting his drawings published, and by the following year he had obtained sufficient subscribers to enable him to begin the publication of his Birds of America, which on its completion in 1838 consisted of 435 coloured plates, containing 1055 figures of birds the size of life. Cuvier called it “le plus magnifique monument que l’art ait encore élevé à la nature.” The descriptive matter to accompany the plates appeared at Edinburgh in 5 vols. from 1831 to 1839 under the title of American Ornithological Biography. During the publication of these works Audubon divided his time between Great Britain and America, devoting his leisure to expeditions to various parts of the United States and Canada for the purpose of collecting new material. In 1842 he bought an estate on the Hudson, now Audubon Park in New York City. In 1844 he published in America a popular octavo edition of his Birds of America. He also took up the preparation of a new work, The Quadrupeds of America, with the collaboration of John Bachman, the publication of which was begun in New York in 1846 and finished in 1853–1854. He died at New York on the 27th of January 1851.
See Ornithology; also Audubon and his Journals (1897), by his grand-daughter Maria R. Audubon, with notes by Elliot Coues.
AUE, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Saxony, at the confluence of the Mulde and Schwarzwasser, 21 m. S.W. from Chemnitz on the railway to Adorf. It has a school of lace-making, foundries, and manufactures of machinery, tin-plate and cotton goods. Pop. (1905) 17,102.
AUERBACH, BERTHOLD (1812–1882), German novelist, was born on the 28th of February 1812 at Nordstetten in the Württemberg Black Forest. His parents were Jews, and he was intended for the ministry; but after studying philosophy at Tübingen, Munich and Heidelberg, and becoming estranged from Jewish orthodoxy by the study of Spinoza, he devoted himself to literature. He made a fortunate beginning in a romance on the life of Spinoza (1837), so interesting in itself, and so close in its adherence to fact, that it may be read with equal advantage as a novel or as a biography. Dichter und Kaufmann followed in 1839, and a translation of Spinoza’s works in 1841, when Auerbach turned to the class of fiction which has made him famous, the Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (1843), stories of peasant life in the Black Forest. In these, as well as in Barfüssele (1856), Edelweiss (1861), and other novels of greater compass, he depicts the life of the south German peasant as “Jeremias Gotthelf” (Albrecht Bitzius) had painted the peasantry of Switzerland, but in a less realistic spirit. When this vein was exhausted Auerbach returned to his first phase as a philosophical novelist, producing Auf der Höhe (1865), Das Landhaus am Rhein (1869), and other romances of profound speculative tendencies, turning on plots invented by himself. With the exception of Auf der Höhe, these works did not enjoy much popularity, and suffer from lack of form and concentration.
