The American Chronicle 1 - Burr Read Online Free PDF

daughter Theodosia (according to legend, forced to walk the plank by pirates). Burr has yet to speak of Theodosia to me but then he seldom mentions the past, unless provoked by a mischievous desire to deflate the reputation of some famed contemporary.
    “I spent the night in the office. So much work to do.” He motioned for me to sit in the visitor’s chair.
    “Mrs. Burr ...?”
    “Madame is on the Heights, where else? But she comes to town later today. Charlie, what have you done with the Texas papers?”
    I got them from the cabinet.
    “Today we buy the land!” Happily, Burr spread out the papers. “Already there are a thousand immigrants at Bremen ready to set sail.” He unfurled a map of the Texas Territory and Louisiana. “I used to know every inch of this part of the world.” With an elegant strong finger (the hands are not old), he traced the Mississippi River’s course to New Orleans.
    “Wild, empty, beautiful country.” Suddenly he poked the map hard. “Here’s where Mr. Jefferson had me arrested.” He grinned like a schoolboy. “With forty-five men I was, he claimed, going to separate the western part of the United States from Greater Virginia, as the union was sometimes referred to by those of us who took no pleasure in Mr. Jefferson and his junto.”
    “What had you meant to do with those forty-five men?”
    Burr’s face shut. There is no other way to describe his expression when he chooses not to communicate. Yet the politeness never falters; he simply ignores the impertinence.
    “Here we put our Germans.” He indicated a territory to the west of the Sabine River. “Water is plentiful. The grazing is excellent. And the land leases are all in order.” He spun fantasies. But are they?
    “Best of all, Madame is eager for us to invest.” Burr pushed his spectacles onto his brow. “An astonishing woman, Charlie. Truly astonishing.”
    “I’m sorry about—well, questioning her about Napoleon.”
    “I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past ought to have been it was.”
    “You don’t suffer from that, Colonel.”
    “But I am not old, Charlie.” His dark eyes opened wide; a trick he has in common with Tyrone Power but unlike that romantic Irish actor, Burr is full of self-mockery. “You see, I have had a special dispensation. Too bad, in a way. Not only do I know what my past ought to have been, I know what it was .”An involuntary—what? Grimace? Look of pain? Or do I invent? He was himself again. “And I am the only one who knows. Probably a very good thing, all in all.”
    “No, Sir. I don’t think it is a good thing. You owe it to the world to tell your side of the story.” What I had planned to say ever since I spoke to Leggett, I proceeded to say; and cursed myself for sounding rehearsed.
    Burr smiled. “My side of the story is not, necessarily, the accurate one. But you flatter me. And I like that!” He kicked a leather-bound chest beneath the table. “I have a good deal of history there: letters, newspapers, copy-books, the beginning of a memoir. Oh, I am marvellous at beginnings, Charlie, truly marvellous!” He almost struck the bitter—and for him uncharacteristic—note. Then quickly, lightly, “But is it not better to have begun well than not to have begun at all? And what a beginning! Not only was I the son of a famous divine but I was also the grandson of an even more famous holy man, of Jonathan Edwards himself, a prophet who—what is the phrase?—walked with God. No, the traditional verb does not describe the progress of the great Puritan. Jonathan Edwards ran with God, and out-raced us all. God, too, I should think. Me certainly. I never knew the saint from Stockbridge but I was brought up in his very long shadow, and chilling it was until I read Voltaire, until I realized there was such a thing as glory in this world for the man who was not afraid to seize what he wanted, to create himself. Like