women, who is said to have possessed both wealth and beauty. The couple
seem to have occupied for a time a plantation belonging to a French
Marquis, situated at Mandeville on the North shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
Here three sons were born to them, of whom John James La Forest was the
third. The daughter seems to have been younger.

His own mother perished in a slave insurrection in St. Domingo, where the
family had gone to live on the Audubon estate at Aux Cayes, when her child
was but a few months old. Audubon says that his father with his plate and
money and himself, attended by a few faithful servants, escaped to New
Orleans. What became of his sister he does not say, though she must have
escaped with them, since we hear of her existence years later. Not long
after, how long we do not know, the father returned to France, where he
married a second time, giving the son, as he himself says, the only mother
he ever knew. This woman proved a rare exception among stepmothers--but she
was too indulgent, and, Audubon says, completely spoiled him, bringing him
up to live like a gentleman, ignoring his faults and boasting of his
merits, and leading him to believe that fine clothes and a full pocket were
the most desirable things in life.

This she was able to do all the more effectively because the father soon
left the son in her charge and returned to the United States in the employ
of the French government, and before long became attached to the army under
La Fayette. This could not have been later than 1781, the year of
Cornwallis' surrender, and Audubon would then have been twenty-one, but
this does not square with his own statements. After the war the father
still served some years in the French navy, but finally retired from active
service and lived at La Gerbetiere in France, where he died at the age of
ninety-five, in 1818.