In 1870 she went to France to superintend there the publication of a new edition of her father's work on Penal Laws, which appeared simultaneously with an English edition. In France a number of her father's friends were still living, among them Mr. Charles Lucas, of the French Institute, who wrote the Preface to the edition brought out in that country.
Having survived her parents and husband, Mrs. Barton died suddenly at Montgomery Place on the 23d of May, 1873.
The last two winters of her life were spent in Washington, where, at a time when American society was singularly rapid, she shone as the last ray from the glory of an age that was gone, in her whole manner and bearing the unmistakable gentlewoman.
Going one day to her former home, the Decatur House, she requested, without giving her name, that she might be permitted to see the drawing-room. General Beale, who then occupied the house, of which his widow still retains possession, in courteous compliance with her request, led the way thither. As she entered the familiar apartment, memory, conjuring up the forms that were no more, shut out the actual presence of her host. At length regaining her self-possession, she said, "A strange desire has of late possessed me to see again this house in which I spent such happy days. Just where I am standing now I stood thirty-nine years ago and was married." "You then were Miss Cora Livingston," said the general, entering into her mood and reverting instinctively to the days when her scintillating wit had made the name famous, though in the sorrow-laden woman there was no trace of the glorious girl.
[EMILY MARSHALL]
(MRS. WILLIAM FOSTER OTIS)
Boston claims as her own the greatest American man of the nineteenth century, and even with more justice, the most beautiful woman born in America within the same period. "Emily Marshall as completely filled the ideal of the lovely and feminine, as did Webster the ideal of the intellectual and the masculine," Quincy, a native of the same State, has written of her, adding that though superlatives were intended only for the use of the very young, not even the cooling influences of half a century enabled him to avoid them in speaking of her.
He never forgot the first time he saw her walking on Dover Street Bridge, Boston's fashionable promenade in those days. "Centuries are likely to come and go," he continued, "before society will again gaze spellbound upon a woman so richly endowed with beauty as was Miss Emily Marshall. She stood before us, a reversion to that faultless type of structure which artists have imagined in the past, and to that ideal loveliness of feminine disposition which poets have placed in the mythical golden age."
Daniel Webster upon one occasion, during his residence in Boston, entered the old Federal Street Theatre, and was hailed with cheers. A few minutes later Emily Marshall appeared in her box, when the entire audience rose as one man and offered her the same homage it had bestowed upon Webster. To us who look back upon her, through nearly three-quarters of a century, she stands forth in such exquisite relief from her environment that we are conscious of it only where the light of her beguiling presence touches it.