e remember,
as we must, the ardent affection which Burr showed his wife, not only
before their marriage, but afterward until her death.

Putting aside these purely spurious instances, as well as others cited
by Mr. Parton, the fact remains that Aaron Burr, like Daniel Webster,
found a great attraction in the society of women; that he could please
them and fascinate them to an extraordinary degree; and that during his
later life he must be held quite culpable in this respect. His
love-making was ardent and rapid, as we shall afterward see in the case
of his second marriage.

Many other stories are told of him. For instance, it is said that he
once took a stage-coach from Jersey City to Philadelphia. The only
other occupant was a woman of high standing and one whose family deeply
hated Aaron Burr. Nevertheless, so the story goes, before they had
reached Newark she was absolutely swayed by his charm of manner; and
when the coach made its last stop before Philadelphia she voluntarily
became his mistress.

It must also be said that, unlike those of Webster and Hamilton, his
intrigues were never carried on with women of the lower sort. This may
be held by some to deepen the charge against him; but more truly does
it exonerate him, since it really means that in many cases these women
of the world threw themselves at him and sought him as a lover, when
otherwise he might never have thought of them.

That he was not heartless and indifferent to those who had loved him
may be shown by the great care which he took to protect their names and
reputations. Thus, on the day before his duel with Hamilton, he made a
will in which he constituted his son-in-law as his executor. At the
same time he wrote a sealed letter to Governor Allston in which he said:

If you can pardon and indulge a folly, I would suggest that Mme. ----,
too well known under the name of Leonora, has claims on my
recollection. She is now with her husband at Santiago, in Cuba.

Another fact has been turned to his discredit. From many women, in the
course of his long life, he had received a great quantity of letters
written by aristocratic hands on scented paper, and these letters he
had never burned. Here again, perhaps, was shown the vanity of the man
who loved love for its own sake. He kept all these papers in a huge
iron-clamped chest, and he instructed Theodosia in case he should die
to burn every letter which might injure any one.

After Theodosia's death