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 Bapteme de la Commune de Bazentin, pour l'Annee 1744._ L'an mil sept cent quarante-quatre, le premier aout est ne en legitime mariage et le lendemain a ete baptise par moy cure soussigne 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 Francoise de Fontaine demeurant en leur chateau de Bazentin le petit, son parrain a ete Messire Jean Baptiste de Fosse, pretre-chanoine de l'eglise collegiale de St.Farcy de Peronne, y demeurant, sa marraine Dame Antoinette Francoise de Bucy, niece de Messire Louis Joseph Michelet, chevalier, ancien commissaire de l'artillerie de France demeurante au chateau de Guillemont, qui ont signe avec mon dit sieur de Bazentin et nous.
Ont signe: De Fosse, De Bucy Michelet, Bazentin.