The American Chronicle 1 - Burr Read Free Page A

business.” Madame cares not for trade.
    Madame blew her nose like a trumpet. “I shall never forgive myself, letting le pauvre go out in that cart, old and feeble as he was. Then when he tomb é ... how you say? fell off the cart and they brought him back to me, I held myself— moi-m ê me —responsible. Night after night I sat up with him, nursing him, praying ...” Obviously Madame assumed that we had all heard the rumour that one dark night she had slipped off her husband’s bandages and let him bleed to death. Lurid stories cluster to her name—as they do to the Colonel’s.
    “... yet despite my vow I was overwhelmed by Colonel Burr.” Madame’s harsh, curiously accented voice dominated the room. “A man I have known since I was a young girl.”
    “A child, Madame.” Burr looked at her, and I detected something new in his smiling eyes: a proprietary look as he finally realized that he is married to the richest woman in New York City.
    The last few months now make sense to me. I used to wonder why the Colonel would so often drop whatever he was doing in order to make the long drive up to the Heights to discuss Madame’s legal affairs (currently she has three suits in the courts). Explained, too, were the long conversations with the egregious Nelson Chase in the inner office, talks which would break off whenever I or Burr’s partner Mr. Craft appeared. And, finally, the matter of money.
    From the law the Colonel makes a good income (by my standards magnificent!). But somehow at the end of the month there is never enough money to pay all the bills. For one thing he has huge debts from the past. For another, he is the most generous of men. On a round baize-covered table in his office he makes a sort of Norman keep of lawbooks in the centre of which he piles the cash as it comes in; then whoever asks for money gets it: veterans of the Revolution, old widows, young protégés—anyone and everyone, in fact, save his creditors. But though he is permanently short of money, he still dreams of empire. Last month he confided to me his latest scheme.
    “For only fifty thousand dollars one can buy a principality in the Texas Territory, to be settled within a year’s time by Germans, who require nothing more than passage money.” The Colonel’s eyes grew wide at the thought of all that acreage planted with all those Germans. “Charlie, do you realize that in twenty years such an investment would be worth millions?” I dared not point out that in twenty years he would be ninety-seven years old.
    Last week I overheard him discuss the Texas scheme quite seriously with a banker and I thought him mad, knowing that he did not have fifty much less fifty thousand dollars. Now of course he has all the money he needs, and so Aaron Burr who might have been third president of the United States or first emperor of Mexico is about to be, in the last years of his life, a grand duke—at the very least—of Texas.
    “Shall we tell them where we first met, Colonel?” Madame was fanning herself. The night was warm and her fair skin had begun to mottle with heat and whiskey.
    In unison the ancient couple pronounced an incomprehensible French name. Later I got Burr to spell it. “Chenelette Dusseaussoir.” It was Madame who explained. “A confectioner’s shop, just across the street from the City Hotel. Everyone went there in the old days. The rum-cake was the best I’ve ever tasted, outside Paris.”
    “What year was this?” Nelson Chase arranged his smooth porcine features into what he doubtless took to be an interested frown. “Seventeen ninety-nine,” said Burr. “Seventeen ninety,” said Madame. A significant difference of opinion which neither bothered to sort out since they were now careening down parallel lanes of memory.
    “I was new to New York, from Providence. But of course I had relatives. And knew everyone de la famille .Oh, it was a wonderful time! For America, that is.” This last had a flat ring to it.