A distinctive social feature of the time were the assembly balls, held usually at some such place as Carucci's, where Cora Livingston's graceful dancing again made her the cynosure of all eyes. The set in which she danced--there were no round dances in those days--was continually surrounded by admiring spectators, many dancers foregoing that pleasure for the greater one of watching her. Cora Livingston in a ball-gown, going through the stately evolutions of a quadrille, the very embodiment of winsome grace, was a vision that tarried long afterwards with many who so beheld her. It was at Carucci's in the winter of 1826, when Miss Livingston's belleship was at its height, that the waltz was first seen in Washington. Baron Stoekelburg, of the Russian legation, was its sponsor, and all Washington looked on with dismay, the Baron and his fair partner, whose name has been lost in oblivion, though her temerity should have earned her a better fate, having the floor to themselves. In 1829 Livingston went into the Senate, and in May, 1831, he succeeded Van Buren as Secretary of State, Van Buren having taken the high ground, so Livingston expressed it, that as a candidate for the Presidency he should not remain in the Cabinet. In 1833 President Jackson offered Livingston the mission to France. Our affairs with that country were in a complicated condition, and Livingston's patriotism induced him to accept the office. In April of that year his daughter was married to Thomas Pennant Barton, a son of Dr. Benjamin Barton, of Philadelphia. President Jackson appointed him Secretary of the legation at Paris, sending his appointment enclosed in a note to Cora, that she might have the pleasure of presenting it to him with her own hands. Her intimate acquaintance with the President dated back to her early childhood, when she was scarcely taller than the cavalry boots worn by the hero of the battle of New Orleans, who readily promised to hang Mitchell, the highest English officer among the prisoners, if the British so much as touched a hair of her father's head. He evinced a paternal pride in the adulation she everywhere received as a woman. At his request she stood as godmother to his wife's great niece, Mary Donalson, now Mrs. Wilcox, who was born in the White House during his term of office. On their return to America, in 1835, both the Livingstons and Bartons made their home at Montgomery Place at Barrytown on the Hudson, an estate of three hundred acres, which Mr. Livingston had inherited from his sister, Mrs. Montgomery, the widow of General Montgomery, of Revolutionary fame.