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 Burr gave the same instructions to Matthew L. Davis, who did, indeed, burn them, though he made their existence a means of blackening the character of Burr.  He should have destroyed them unopened, and should never have mentioned them in his memoirs of the man who trusted him as a friend.

Such was Aaron Burr throughout a life which lasted for eighty years.  His last romance, at the age of seventy-eight, is worth narrating because it has often been misunderstood.

Mme. Jumel was a Rhode Island girl who at seventeen years of age eloped with an English officer, Colonel Peter Croix.  Her first husband died while she was still quite young, and she then married a French wine-merchant, Stephen Jumel, some twenty years her senior, but a man of much vigor and intelligence.  M. Jumel made a considerable fortune in New York, owning a small merchant fleet; and after Napoleon’s downfall he and his wife went to Paris, where she made a great impression in the salons by her vivacity and wit and by her lavish expenditures.

Losing, however, part of what she and her husband possessed, Mme. Jumel returned to New York, bringing with her a great amount of furniture and paintings, with which she decorated the historic house still standing in the upper part of Manhattan Island—­a mansion held by her in her own right.  She managed her estate with much ability; and in 1828 M. Jumel returned to live with her in what was in those days a splendid villa.

Four years later, however, M. Jumel suffered an accident from which he died in a few days, leaving his wife still an attractive woman and not very much past her prime.  Soon after she had occasion to seek for legal advice, and for this purpose visited the law-office of Aaron Burr.  She had known him a good many years before; and, though he was now seventy-eight years of age, there was no perceptible change in him.  He was still courtly in manner, tactful, and deferential, while physically he was straight, active, and vigorous.