It argues the possession of extraordinary attributes to have been a belle of wide repute in the days when there was no telegraph to flash the record of a woman's beauty, charm, or social progress from one end of the country to the other, when the press contained only the briefest accounts of purely local and wholly public events, when every letter that might or might not have contained her name or have been a herald of her loveliness cost its sender twenty-five cents a sheet in postage, when her few and simple toilets were painstakingly made by hand, when she went to balls on horseback, arriving sometimes with a wrinkled gown but seldom with a ruffled temper, when all travelling was done by means of a stage-coach, and a journey from one city to another was sometimes the event of a lifetime, and when the comparatively few women who crossed the seas did so in merchant vessels not infrequently owned by their own fathers, and spent many long weeks in the passage. Those who come within the radius of its charm, however, easily recognize the power of a queenly personality, as the lives of the most illustrious men in every period of our history have borne testimony. Among the women who unite the centuries there is a brilliant promise, moreover, that there will be those in the twentieth, as there have been throughout the nineteenth, "to perpetuate that empire which beauty first established." The writer gratefully acknowledges her indebtedness to all those whose courtesy or assistance has in any way lightened the task of collecting the data for these sketches; to those who by kindly lending portraits in their possession, as well as to those who by graciously permitting the use of their own portraits, have thereby added so much to the value and interest of this volume. PARIS, June 22, 1900. CONTENTS [Illustration] PAGE MARCIA BURNS (Mrs. John Peter Van Ness) 11 THEODOSIA BURR (Mrs. Joseph Alston) 18 ELIZABETH PATTERSON (Madame Jerome Bonaparte) 39 THE CATON SISTERS 61 MARGARET O'NEILL (Mrs. John H. Eaton) 69 CORA LIVINGSTON (Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton) 80 EMILY MARSHALL (Mrs. William Foster Otis) 90 OCTAVIA WALTON (Madame Le Vert) 102 FANNY TAYLOR (Mrs. Thomas Harding Ellis) 118 JESSIE BENTON (Mrs. John C. Frémont) 123 SALLIE WARD (Mrs. George F. Downs) 148 HARRIET LANE (Mrs. Henry Elliott Johnston) 161 ADÈLE CUTTS (Mrs. Robert Williams) 175 EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (Mrs. Hughes-Hallett) 190 KATE CHASE (Mrs. William Sprague) 206 MATTIE OULD (Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft) 230