the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt three)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

He stopped. Relit the stump of his seegar. “So a number of us began. But then who finished? Not I, as we know.” He blew rings of smoke in my face. “At the end the laurels went to a land surveyor from Virginia who became the ‘father’ of his country. But let us be fair. Since General Washington could sire nothing in the flesh, it is fitting that he be given credit for having conceived this union. A mule stallion, as it were, whose unnatural progeny are these states. So at the end, not to the swift but to the infertile went the race.” Burr found this image amusing. I was a bit shocked. Like everyone else I think of Washington as dull but perfect.