Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 59

Table of Contents

Theodosia Burr, the younger, at the age of eleven, had become the sole mistress of the great establishment at Richmond Hill. She had as companion and playmate a French girl of about her own age: Natalie de Lage, the daughter of Admiral de Lage of the French Navy. She had been separated from her mother by the exigencies of the Revolution, and brought to New York by her nurse. Burr gave the child an asylum, and adopted and educated her as his own. He had a veritable passion for adopting and rearing children. Throughout his long life they inhabited his households, and he never distinguished, in the abundance of love and generous dealing that he lavished upon them, between the children of his own blood and those of a strictly legal relation. Natalie de Lage was eventually to marry the son of General Sumter of South Carolina.

Theo made an excellent head to her father’s house. She entertained his guests, even during his frequent absences, with a gentle gravity and bearing beyond her years that excited the admiration of the most distinguished. She grew swiftly to remarkable womanhood, the most brilliant of her day. She was learned in the classics, in modern languages, in history, philosophy and the sciences. She danced and sang and played the piano with taste and feeling. She had ranged widely and well in literature, and she could quote for hours from the masterpieces of poetry. Yet she was no bluestocking, no mere pedant; even though Burr was writing in 1797, “and do you regret that you are not also a woman? That you are not numbered in that galaxy of beauty which adorns an assembly-room? Coquetting for admiration and attracting flattery? No. I answer with confidence. You feel you are maturing for solid friendship. The friends you gain you will never lose; and no one, I think, will dare to insult your understanding by such compliments as are most graciously received by too many of your sex.”^[242]

The testimony of contemporaries and of her extant portraits is overwhelmingly to the contrary. She was beautiful with a proud lift of head and an aristocratic mold of features; wherever she went half the eligible young males of the town sighed fruitlessly after her—and a good many of the older, more substantial men, too. She was beloved equally by women as by men. She was “elegant without ostentation, and learned without pedantry.” She danced “with more grace than any young lady of New York.”^[243] Her wit sparkled and warmed; she possessed her father’s airy sense of humor. She was the living proof of the success of Aaron Burr’s seemingly repellent system of education. Had he not thrown his great talents and energy into politics he could have become a great educator.

She adored her father, and he worshiped her. Which in itself was a tribute to his methods. It was a love as pure and noble and unselfish as anything in the realm of history, yet it was based on a frank and full understanding between the two. Her faith in him never wavered, even during the darkest days of his career, and in return he bared his soul to her candid gaze. He hid nothing, not even those things that most men wish to hide even from themselves. The Journal of his wanderings in exile, that astounding portrayal of a stripped human being, was written in the plainest language for her eyes alone. It was a bond that the passing years strengthened, and when it was sundered by her tragic death, something snapped in his soul too, never to mend.

“The happiness of my life,” he had written, “depends on your exertions; for what else, for whom else do I live?”^[244]