What a romantic picture he makes in the finery that sets him off so well—brilliant eyes sparkling, eloquent lips smiling, a courtly figure bending over the hostess’s hand. Only a moment for the lightest kind of banter with the ladies, and he is off to the Pemberton mansion to work far into the night. Mrs. Hamilton will linger a little longer, an appealing type of woman, her delicate face set off by ‘fine eyes which are very dark’ and ‘hold the life and energy of the restrained countenance.’[531] Hamilton had found her in the Schuyler homestead at Albany, ‘a brunette with the most good-natured, dark lovely eyes,’[532] gentle, retiring, but in the home circle full of gayety and courage. Weeks and months sometimes found her missing from the social circle, for with her, in those days, life was just one baby after another.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, and Miss Wolcott.’
A pleasing personality was that of the handsome protégé of Hamilton, breathing the spirit of jollity, given to badinage, capable, too, of serious conversation on books and plays. He loses himself in the lively throng, but his infectious laughter is as revealing of his presence as the bell of Bossy in the woods. But we are more interested in his companions. Mrs. Wolcott was all loveliness and sweetness, grace and dignity, and such was the appeal of her conversation that one statesman thought her ‘a divine woman’; another, ‘the magnificent Mrs. Wolcott’; and the brusque Senator Tracy of her State, on being assured by a condescending diplomat that she would shine at any court, snorted that she even shone at Litchfield.[533] Even so the eyes of the younger men are upon Mary Ann Wolcott, sister of the Federalist leader, a pearl of her sex, combining an extraordinary physical beauty with opulent charms, and a conversational brilliance unsurpassed by any woman of the social circle. Very soon she would marry the clever, cynical Chauncey Goodrich and take her place in official society in her own right. The Wolcotts, we may be sure, read Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ with amazement and disgust.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Sedgwick.’
A magnificent type of physical manhood, the face of one accustomed to command and sneer down opposition; a woman of elegance and refinement, typical of the best New England could offer in a matron.
‘Pierce Butler.’
A handsome widower this man, maintaining an elegant establishment in Philadelphia, who affected to be a democrat, and carefully selected his associates from among the aristocracy, a South Carolinian with a certain reverence for wealth.
‘Mrs. William Jackson.’
An equally charming but less beautiful sister of the hostess, now wife of one of Washington’s secretaries, a favorite at the Morris mansion, and with no time for thinking on the grievances of the yokels and mechanics—an American prototype of the merry ladies of Versailles before the storm broke.
Among the foreign faces we miss the tall figure of Talleyrand whose Philadelphia immoralities shocked the French Minister, and whose affairs with a lady of color[534] excluded him from the Bingham drawing-room. But there is Viscount de Noailles who had proposed the abolition of feudal rights in the early days of the French Revolution; and Count Tilley, the dissipated roué planning an elopement with his hostess’s daughter with the connivance of her French governess; and Brissot de Warville, enlightened political idealist of France soon to fall beneath the knife of Robespierre. There, too, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt who was redolent of courts, and the Baring brothers of London, bankers, soon to marry the Bingham girls.