Burr

by Gore Vidal

  We entered the front hall just in time to witness Colonel Burr’s (or is it Madame Jumel’s?) mating dance.

  At the end of a long entrance hall, ablaze with chandeliers, stood Madame herself; wearing what looked to be a French ball-gown. Sumptuous, I think, is the word. An imposing woman, with huge eye-sockets containing small gray eyes; a small mouth, square jaw. She was hung with bright jewels. Yes, it must have been a ball-gown (it came from France she told us later) of a style either not yet known to provincial New York or known and discarded. Probably the former. I seldom see the gentry close-to.

  “Colonel Burr! I did not expect you, Sir!” These were, I gather, the first words she had spoken to him. They were still echoing through the hall as I propelled Dr. Bogart toward a liveried footman who paid us no mind at all, his attention like ours on the lady of the house who stood as though poised for flight, one hand on the railing of the staircase, the other more or less over her heart.

  “My dear Madame, what I warned you of yesterday has come to pass.” Burr galloped the length of the hall toward the fair Eliza who, having to choose between a retreat to the large many-sided drawing-room behind her and the safety of the rooms above, skipped onto the first step of the staircase, still clinging to banister, to heart.

  “What was that, Colonel? I remember no warning.”

  “Madame.” Burr took the hand which had been raised to protect her heart. She surrendered it with a show of reluctance. “I have come, as I promised, with a clergyman. With Dr. Bogart.”

  “Great honour, Mrs. Jumel …” began Dr. Bogart.

  Burr talked through him. “And a witness. From my office. Charles Schuyler …”

  The illustrious New York name diverted Madame for a moment. “Schuyler?”

  Before I could assure her that I was not one of the Schuylers, Burr had matters as well in hand as her hand itself, which he had now managed to bring to his lips, still talking in a low and perfectly pitched hypnotic voice. “Dr. Bogart, my oldest friend—a clergyman known to all of us at the time of the Revolution. A patriot, a true and holy man …” Dr. Bogart looked stunned at this encomium. “And an intimate friend of General Washington—who had no friends—has consented to marry us. To-night. Now.”

  “Colonel Burr!” Madame Jumel then gave as good a performance as was ever performed at the Park Theatre. She tried to pull her hand free, failed; tried to mount the stairs, was restrained. Called for help to butler, footman, was met with nervous giggles and averted eyes by those satellites. After some eight minutes by the clock in the hall (given her by Napoleon Bonaparte, she told us later), Eliza Bowen Jumel consented to become Mrs. Aaron Burr.

  By now rather red in the face, Madame ordered whiskey for herself, Madeira for us. Then as if by a pre-arranged signal, we were joined by Nelson Chase and his wife Mary Eliza, the niece of Madame Jumel (though it is rumoured that she might well be the fruit of one of Madame’s early alliances). Nelson Chase is a plump, foolish young man, fascinated by Colonel Burr. For over a year he has been associated with our firm, pretending to practise law. I had not met Mary Eliza before; she is pleasant, not pretty but winning. Needless to say, she does not shine but then no woman can in Madame’s glorious presence.

  The Colonel and Madame (I can’t call her Mrs. Burr) were married in a small parlour to the left of the main hall. Nelson kept murmuring “fabulous, fabulous!” The right word, I suppose. The brief ceremony was followed by a splendid supper in the dining-room. Obviously Madame’s cook had anticipated what her mistress had not—that she would succumb to the Colonel’s heralded unheralded assault.

  It was the first time I had seen Colonel Burr “in society.” I had known him only in the office—and in court. Not that he argues many cases now-a-days: there are still judges who feel that they must vindicate the death of Alexander Hamilton by addressing his murderer rudely. The last time I attended the Colonel in court, the judge unearthed—if he did not newly mint—an obscure state statute.

  The judge roared at Burr. “Don’t you know that law, Mr. Burr! Don’t you know it?”

  When the judge at last stopped shouting, Burr said, in his mildest voice, “No, Your Honour, I do not know it. But I hear it.”

  Last night, however, was my first experience of the legendary Aaron Burr, the one-time leader of New York fashion, the intimate of German princes, the lion of the London drawing-rooms, the man Jeremy Bentham regarded as perfectly civilised. Listening to the Colonel’s conversation, I could see how he had so easily enchanted three generations of Europeans as well as of Americans, how he had mesmerized both men and women like the devil—no, more like Faust to whom everything marvellous comes, then on the midnight goes. Oh, what I would give to read that sulphurous contract in order to see what clauses the devil added and Burr accepted, knowing that they would not hold up in court. And signed with an elegant flourish. I don’t envy the devil when he takes to court Aaron Burr.

  We drank toast after toast. My head still aches: I wanted to vomit before I went to sleep but did not, fearing to disturb the lovers. Madame got moderately drunk on whiskey. Nelson was very drunk, embarrassing his wife but no one else.

  “I swore I would never re-marry.” Madame gave her niece a tender smile. “Didn’t I, petite?”

  “Certainly, Tante!” Both aunt and niece have spent many years in Paris where the girl was sent to school.

  “When my beloved Stephen …”

  “A true gentleman, Madame.” Colonel Burr reacted superbly to the mention of his predecessor, and the source of his current wealth. “I should think the most beloved man of his generation, in this city.” He stopped the qualifying just short of adding “in the wine 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 tombé … how you say? fell off the cart and they brought him back to me, I held myself—moi-même—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. “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 Rochefort 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 Maréchal 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 Evening Post!” Leggett looked at me with—well, amused scorn, as the English novelists say.

  “Too long?” I had given him a straightforward two-page description of the wedding, scribbled on the ride back to New York. The newly wed couple had departed at dawn in Madame’s yellow coach with six horses to visit the Colonel’s nephew, Governor Edwards, at Hartford, Connecticut. Yes, I am trying to be a journalist, mentioning all facts.

  Leggett sighed. “We are interested in destroying Mr. Biddle’s bank, in promoting free trade, in the gradual abolition of slavery, in workers’ unions. We are not interested in a retired whore’s wedding to a traitor.”

  Although I am used to Leggett’s furious style, I was obliged to defend the Colonel, or at least my version of his nuptials. “Aaron Burr is not a traitor, as far as we know. Madame Jumel is not a whore but a respectable and rich widow no matter what she might have been years ago. And this is damned interesting. The two most notorious people in New York have got married.”

  Leggett gave a long wheeze, to signify disgust. At thirty-two (seven years older than I), he looks like my father. We met when I was still at Columbia and he was writing theatre reviews for the Mirror, and trying to become an actor like his friend Edwin Forrest. He failed on the stage. Yet of course he is an actor, with a stage more important than that of the Bowery Theatre. As a journalist he has taken all politics and literature for his field, and is famous.

  The curtain-raiser to Leggett’s continuing drama occurred when he was cashiered from the navy for fighting a duel. At the court-martial he insulted his commanding officer with a tirade of quotations from Shakespeare. Then he set out to take New York by storm. Although he failed as an actor, he succeeded as an author with a book called The Rifle; he then published his own magazine Critic which failed. Now he is an editor of the Evening Post and a power in the city. Feared by everyone for his pen, not to mention his duelling pistols or, more precisely, the Malacca cane with which he has whipped at least one rival editor. Yet he is plainly dying: a once solid frame shattered first by yellow fever in the navy, then consumption.

  When I was seventeen I thought Leggett a god. Now he annoys more than he charms me. Annoys himself, too. But I continue to see him and he continues to encourage (as well as annoy) me. He knows I am not happy with the law, that I want to free myself somehow to write. Unfortunately, only political journalists are well-paid for writing, and I am not interested in politics (but then neither was Leggett until recently). So I dream of a career like Washington Irving’s; and write short pieces that were sometimes published here and there but were almost never paid for until last month when Leggett proposed that I do an occasional piece for the Evening Post. Also: “You should use your relationship with Aaron Burr.”

&
nbsp; “In what way?”

  But Leggett would say nothing beyond “Take notes. Keep a record. Assay his wickedness …”

  The story of Colonel Burr’s marriage was, I thought, exactly what Leggett had in mind. Apparently, I was wrong.

  “All right, Charlie, I’ll take it in to Mr. Bryant. He’ll decide. I won’t.” Leggett went into the next office. I could hear the low murmur of talk. Then Leggett returned, shutting the door behind him. “Your prose will have Mr. Bryant’s full attention.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.” I tried to sound sardonic, like Colonel Burr.

  Leggett put his feet on the table, dislodging papers and books. With a dirty handkerchief, he rubbed the ink from the middle finger of his right hand. “Charlie, are you still leading your dissolute life?”

  “I am studying law, yes.”

  “Good answer. I trained you well.” He grinned; then coughed for a long bad moment into the inky handkerchief and I looked away, not wanting to see what I suspected would be there, the bright arterial blood.

  Coughing stopped, handsome haggard face gray and beaded with sweat, Leggett spoke in a low tired voice. “I meant, of course, Mrs. Townsend’s establishment.”

  “Once a week. No more. I have put away boyish things.”

  “In order to spend, to die alone!” Eyes shone with amusement and fever. “Tell me of Mrs. Townsend’s latest wards.”

  “There are three very young Irish girls, only just arrived, positively dewy …”

  “No more! I am married, Charlie. That’s enough.”

  “You asked.”

  “Like Odysseus then, I must stop my ears. Sing to me no more siren songs of my youth. Of those fair Hibernian charms I once …”

  We were joined by Mr. Bryant. A remote man with carved lips and full face whiskers, he looks to be in his forties; he has the New English manner which effectively disguises whatever pleasure he takes in his reputation as America’s First Poet (Leggett likes to think of himself as the Second Poet, particularly when Fitz-Greene Halleck is in the room). But Mr. Bryant has yet to mention anything so trivial as verse in my presence. Each time we meet, he is very much the assistant editor of the Evening Post, decorously devoted to radical politics. Incidentally, he is probably the only man in New York who still writes with a quill pen. Even Colonel Burr prefers modern steel to classic feather.