Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution | Page 4

1744, at Bazentin-le-Petit. This little village is situated in Picardy, or what is now the Department of the Somme, in the Arrondissement de P��ronne, Canton d'Albert, a little more than four miles from Albert, between this town and Bapaume, and near Longueval, the nearest post-office to Bazentin. The village of Bazentin-le-Grand, composed of a few more houses than its sister hamlet, is seen half a mile to the southeast, shaded by the little forest such as borders nearly every town and village in this region. The two hamlets are pleasantly situated in a richly cultivated country, on the chalk uplands or downs of Picardy, amid broad acres of wheat and barley variegated with poppies and the purple cornflower, and with roadsides shaded by tall poplars.
The peasants to the number of 251 compose the diminishing population. There were 356 in 1880, or about that date. The silence of the single little street, with its one-storied, thatched or tiled cottages, is at infrequent intervals broken by an elderly dame in her sabots, or by a creaking, rickety village cart driven by a farmer-boy in blouse and hob-nailed shoes. The largest inhabited building is the mairie, a modern structure, at one end of which is the village school, where fifteen or twenty urchins enjoy the instructions of the worthy teacher. A stone church, built in 1774, and somewhat larger than the needs of the hamlet at present require, raises its tower over the quiet scene.
Our pilgrimage to Bazentin had for its object the discovery of the birthplace of Lamarck, of which we could obtain no information in Paris. Our guide from Albert took us to the mairie, and it was with no little satisfaction that we learned from the excellent village teacher, M.?Duval, that the house in which the great naturalist was born was still standing, and but a few steps away, in the rear of the church and of the mairie. With much kindness he left his duties in the schoolroom, and accompanied us to the ancient structure.
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF LAMARCK, FRONT VIEW]
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF LAMARCK]
The modest chateau stands a few rods to the westward of the little village, and was evidently the seat of the leading family of the place. It faces east and is a two-storied house of the shape seen everywhere in France, with its high, incurved roof; the walls, nearly a foot and a half thick, built of brick; the corners and windows of blocks of white limestone. It is about fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. Above the roof formerly rose a small tower. There is no porch over the front door. Within, a rather narrow hall passes through the centre, and opens into a large room on each side. What was evidently the drawing-room or salon was a spacious apartment with a low white wainscot and a heavy cornice. Over the large, roomy fireplace is a painting on the wood panel, representing a rural scene, in which a shepherdess and her lover are engaged in other occupations than the care of the flock of sheep visible in the distance. Over the doorway is a smaller but quaint painting of the same description. The house is uninhabited, and perhaps uninhabitable--indeed almost a ruin--and is used as a storeroom for wood and rubbish by the peasants in the adjoining house to the left, on the south.
The ground in front was cultivated with vegetables, not laid down to a lawn, and the land stretched back for perhaps three hundred to four hundred feet between the old garden walls.
Here, amid these rural scenes, even now so beautiful and tranquil, the subject of our sketch was born and lived through his infancy and early boyhood.[1]
If his parents did not possess an ample fortune, they were blessed with a numerous progeny, for Lamarck was the eleventh and youngest child, and seems to have survived all the others. Biographers have differed as to the date of the birth of Lamarck.[2] Happily the exact date had been ascertained through the researches of M.?Philippe Salmon; and M.?Duval kindly showed us in the thin volume of records, with its tattered and torn leaves, the register of the Acte de Naissance, and made a copy of it, as follows:
Extrait du Registre aux Actes de Bapt��me de la Commune de Bazentin, pour l'Ann��e 1744.
L'an mil sept cent quarante-quatre, le premier ao?t est n�� en l��gitime mariage et le lendemain a ��t�� baptis�� par moy cur�� soussign�� Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine, fils de Messire Jacques Philippe de?Monet, chevalier de?Lamarck, seigneur des Bazentin grand et petit et de haute et puissante Dame Marie Fran?oise de?Fontaine demeurant en leur chateau de Bazentin le petit, son parrain a ��t�� Messire Jean Baptiste de?Foss��, pr��tre-chanoine de l'��glise coll��giale de St.?Farcy de?P��ronne, y demeurant, sa marraine Dame Antoinette Fran?oise de?Bucy, ni��ce de Messire