Among all the women of the period none approached Mrs. Edward Livingston in brilliance, charm, and elegance, nor did any of the ladies of the Whig circle, not even Mrs. Tayloe, who wondered if Miss Martineau’s novels were “pretty,” approach her in the lavishness and taste of her dinners and parties. “Mrs. Livingston takes the lead in the fashionable world,” wrote Mrs. Smith, who found it hard to concede the virtues of the Jacksonians.[83] “I know that Mr. Livingston gives elegant dinners and his wines are the best in the city,” recorded a press correspondent of the time.[84] “We dined by invitation with Mr. Secretary Livingston,” wrote Justice Story, an enemy of the Jacksonians. “The dinner was superb and unequalled by anything I have seen in Washington except at some of the foreign ministers’, and was served exclusively in the French style.”[85] This captivating woman, of French descent, had known a childhood of romance in a marble palace by the sea in St. Domingo, had miraculously escaped the servile insurrection, and reached New Orleans to become the wife of Livingston. Wonderfully vivacious, eloquent in conversation, intelligently interested in politics, steeped in the literature of the ages, witty and spirited, her home in Lafayette Square more nearly resembled a salon than anything the capital has ever known. Even the most bigoted Whigs of the day were glad to lay aside their partisanship at her threshold, and leaders, still flushed with a verbal duel in the Senate, smiled amicably upon each other in her drawing-room. Here one might meet John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Bushrod Washington of the Supreme Court, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Wirt, or Randolph. About her, too, she gathered a coterie of cultured women, and Mrs. John Quincy Adams and Mrs. Andrew Stevenson came and went in the house on the Square with as little ceremony as members of the household. The charm of the house was enhanced by the exquisite Cora, the daughter, who reigned as the belle and toast of the town until her marriage, captivating, among others, the impressionable young Josiah Quincy, who thought her “undoubtedly the greatest belle in the U.S.,” and, if not “transcendently handsome,” possessed of a “fine figure, a pretty face.” Finding it “the height of the ton to be her admirer,” the young Bostonian followed the fashion with all his heart.[86]