Both of us were too ill to attend Mrs. Davis's reception. It
proved a very sensational one. First, a fire in the house, then a robbery — said
to be an arranged plan of the usual bribed servants there and some escaped
Yankee prisoners. To-day the Examiner is lost in wonder at the stupidity of the
fire and arson contingent. If they had only waited a few hours until everybody
was asleep; after a reception the household would be so tired and so sound
asleep. Thanks to the editor's kind counsel maybe the arson contingent will
wait and do better next time.
Letters from home carried Mr. Chesnut off to-day. Thackeray
is dead. I stumbled upon Vanity Fair for myself. I had never heard of Thackeray
before. I think it was in 1850. I know I had been ill at the New York Hotel,1
and when left alone, I slipped down-stairs and into a bookstore that I had
noticed under the hotel, for something to read. They gave me the first half of
Pendennis. I can recall now the very kind of paper it was printed on, and the
illustrations, as they took effect upon me. And yet when I raved over it, and
was wild for the other half, there were people who said it was slow; that
Thackeray was evidently a coarse, dull, sneering writer; that he stripped human
nature bare, and made it repulsive, etc.
_______________
1 The New York Hotel, covering a block front on
Broadway at Waverley Place, was a favorite stopping place for Southerners for
many years before the war and after it. In comparatively recent times it was
torn down and supplanted by a business block.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 281
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