But these important works that I have begun, and have in a well-advanced state, have been in spite of all my efforts suspended and practically abandoned for the last ten years.

The loss of my pension from the Academy of Sciences and the enormous increase in the price of articles of subsistence have placed me, with my numerous family, in a state of distress which leaves me neither the time nor the freedom from care to cultivate science in a fruitful way." Lamarck's collection of shells, the accumulation of nearly thirty years,[38] was purchased by the government at the price of five thousand livres.

This sum was used by him to balance the price of a national estate for which he had contracted by virtue of the law of 28 ventose de l'an IV.[39] This little estate, which was the old domain of Beauregard, was a modest farm-house or country-house at Hericourt-Saint-Samson, in the Department of Seine-et-Oise, not far to the northward of Beauvais, and about fifty miles from Paris.

It is probable that as a proprietor of a landed property he passed the summer season, or a part of it, on this estate.
This request was, we may believe, made from no unworthy or mercenary motive, but because he thought that such an indemnity was his due.

Some years after (in 1809) the chair of zooelogy, newly formed by the Faculte des Sciences in Paris, was offered to him.