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Updated: May 7, 2025
Audubon's friends began to consider him a kind of harmless madman, for what sane person would devote his life to a work so laborious and seemingly so useless? He made a little money occasionally by giving drawing lessons; but he was never content except when roaming the plains and forests, hunting for some new specimen.
Here this bird, which, according to Audubon's observations in Louisiana, is shy and recluse, affecting remote marshes and the borders of large ponds of stagnant water, had placed its nest in the lowest twig of the lowest branch of a large sycamore, immediately over a great thoroughfare, and so near the ground that a person standing in a cart or sitting on a horse could have reached it with his hand.
The great naturalist invited his callers to dine with him at six on the next Saturday. They next presented their letter to Geoffroy de St. Hilaire, with whom they were particularly pleased. Neither had he ever heard of Audubon's work. The dinner with Cuvier gave him a nearer view of the manners and habits of the great man.
I looked at him and here follows the result: Age about sixty-five; size corpulent, five feet five English measure; head large, face wrinkled and brownish; eyes grey, brilliant and sparkling; nose aquiline, large and red; mouth large with good lips; teeth few, blunted by age, excepting one on the lower jaw, measuring nearly three-quarters of an inch square." The italics are not Audubon's.
For it was now the darkest and stillest hour of the night; and we sat in the dim starlight, hardly seeing one another, so that it seemed possible to say, as behind a veil, things that otherwise it would have been natural to suppress. A long silence followed Audubon's last words. They went home, I dare say to many of us more than we should have cared to confess.
But he who goes in a right spirit will not be disappointed, and will find the taste of this kind of life better, though bitterer, than the writers have described. There is an old legend which one of our poets has made use of about the bird in the brain, a legend based, perhaps, upon the human significance of our feathered neighbors. Was not Audubon's brain full of birds, and very lively ones, too?
At any rate, for my part, I find life extraordinarily good, just as it is, not mine only, I mean, but everybody's; well, except Audubon's, I suppose I ought to say, and even he, perhaps finds it rather good to be able to find it so bad. But I'm not going to argue with him, because I know it's no use.
Audubon's last years were peaceful and happy, and were passed at his home on the Hudson, amid his children and grandchildren, surrounded by the scenes that he loved. After his eyesight began to fail him, his devoted wife read to him, she walked with him, and toward the last she fed him.
Stopping at Charleston, South Carolina, on this southern trip, he made the acquaintance of the Reverend John Bachman, and a friendship between these two men was formed that lasted as long as they both lived. Subsequently, Audubon's sons, Victor and John, married Dr. Bachman's two eldest daughters.
Near him there lived an English family by the name of Bakewell, but he had such a strong antipathy to the English that he postponed returning the call of Mr. Bakewell, who had left his card at Mill Grove during one of Audubon's excursions to the woods. In the late fall or early winter, however, he chanced to meet Mr.
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