I confuse Aubusson and Audubon. You will know the former is a village in central France famous for the production of rugs – a French Axminster, if you will.
Audubon is a different marmite à poisson, although both are French. Jean-Jacques Rabin (1785 – 1851) was born in Saint-Dominique, the illegitimate son of Lieutenant Audubon, a French naval officer from Brittany. Jeanne Rabine (also from Brittany) was his mistress. The boy was subsequently brought up in France by his father’s wife and his name changed to Audubon. His fame lies in his book, Birds of America.
It’s a digression but worth mentioning; there are one hundred and twenty copies left today of which only thirteen are in private ownership.
To dis-digress this is the third plate in Birds of America and has an interesting but obscure family connection – my family of course. It is of a Prothonotary Warbler. Like many North Americans it finds the winters cold and migrates from Ontario, where it breeds in swamps, to the West Indies so you may have seen it in either location or as a migrant visitor. Strangely a stop-over on the Potomac river featured in a controversial American trial in 1948. As that trial has no obvious family connection we will proceed.
The warblers’ name derive from their plumage slightly resembling the yellow robes once worn by prothonotaries. They were rarer than the warbler. There were just seven until Pope Sixtus V (1585 – 1590) upped them to twelve. What is a prothonotary?
“In the Roman Catholic Church, protonotary apostolic is the title for a member of the highest non-episcopal college of prelates in the Roman Curiaor, outside Rome, an honorary prelate on whom the pope has conferred this title and its special privileges.” (Wikipedia)
In the early 17th century this honour was conferred on a collateral ancestor; a feather in his cap.
(To be continued)