The American Chronicle 1 - Burr Read Free Page B

“My true home is France. Isn’t it, Mary Eliza?”
    “ Mais oui , Tante .”Dutiful girl. She has a fine figure.
    “The only reason we came back was because of the Emperor.” Madame was in full sail, drinking whiskey as fast as the butler served it. Burr was bright-eyed, expectant, like a squirrel waiting to be fed a nut.
    “When my darling Stephen and I arrived at Roche-fort in France aboard our ship—the Eliza ,named for me—the Emperor was in the harbour.” Madame addressed herself to me since the others had heard the story many times before. “Waterloo had been fought—and lost by us.”
    Madame’s accent was shifting from New England Yankee to émigré French. “Our emperor was aboard his ship but the harbour was blockaded by the Anglais .What to do? We devised and discarded a thousand schemes. Finally, it was decided between my husband and Mar é chal Bertrand—a man of the old school, let me tell you, loyal, honourable—that the Emperor come aboard the Eliza —in disguise—and since we flew the American flag, we would slip past the British fleet and carry him to New Orleans where he would be safe until France, until the world recalled him to his rightful place! You know his eyes were like yours, Colonel Burr. Burning, powerful.”
    “So I have been told, Madame.” Burr did not mind having the resemblance noted. After all, each was an adventurer who succeeded for a time; then failed. The difference between them was simply one of degree.
    “But les sales Anglais seized him and took him away to St. Helena and killed him, the greatest man that ever lived, my idol.” Madame’s eyes filled with tears. The curls on either side of her face are too symmetrical. She must wear a wig.
    “When the Emperor left, he gave my aunt his travelling carriage and his military trunk.” Mary Eliza sounded like a guide at the city museum, explaining for the hundredth time the history of the mammoth’s tooth. “It contained his clock among other things.”
    “That clock!” Madame indicated an ornate clock with a portrait of Napoleon beneath the face. Madame then gave us a quick inventory of other Napoleonic items, each given her personally by the Emperor.
    I could not resist the tactless question. “Did you actually meet Napoleon?”
    “Meet him!” A resonant deep cry. Burr gave me a swift look that silenced me for the rest of the evening. “He was all I lived for! The reason I was driven from France by King Louis Philippe ...” On and on. Later, the Colonel reprimanded me. We were at the second-floor landing. Madame had already gone to the bridal chamber. “Madame has a vivid imagination,” began the Colonel.
    “I’m sorry, Sir.”
    “No harm done. In point of fact, she did not meet the Emperor—any more than I did—but the rest of the story is true. It was Napoleon’s last chance to escape on an American ship. The ship just happened to be the Eliza .But the gods were against him.”
    Burr indicated a small room at the end of a short corridor. “That was General Washington’s office in seventeen seventy-six. He lived in this house for three months, during which he managed to lose New York City to the British. But despite his incompetence, the gods always supported him in the end. I suspect Cromwell was right: the man who does not know where he’s going goes farthest. Talleyrand used to tell me that for the great man all is accident. Obviously, he was not a great man since he survived by careful planning, by never showing his true feelings. You must learn that art, Charlie.”
    “I’m sorry, Colonel. What I said ...”
    “Think nothing of it, my boy. God mend you. Now,” he rubbed his hands together to indicate mock rapture, “I go to the Hymeneal couch.”
    We exchanged good nights and he rapped on the door opposite Washington’s study. Madame’s voice, slightly thick with whiskey, exclaimed, “ Entrez , mon mari ,”and Colonel Burr vanished inside.

Three
    “CHARLIE, THIS IS NOT FOR THE