1876 by Gore Vidal

cheaper food is here than in Europe. Just now I walked by a decent-looking restaurant that advertises a meal of hot beef “cut from the joint,” bread, pickles and potatoes for seventy-five cents. In the shops, beef costs thirty-five cents the pound. John Apgar says that one can live comfortably in one’s own home with three servants on six thousand a year. Unfortunately, Emma and I have less than half that amount.
    Luxuriously, I read the dozen morning newspapers, so conveniently collected for me by the friendly Astor bar. Each front page was bold with Tweed’s escape. Since I am not easily distressed by the familiar corruption of my native and still (to be confessed only to this page) hopelessly provincial city, I tend rather to be on the side of that large bear-like man with the small clear eyes and thick beard and I hope that Mr. Tweed manages to escape for good with all his swag. But then I tend to side with criminals. Although my sympathies in France are officially republican, at heart I delight in all Bonapartes—particularly in the first one, whose crimes were on such a large scale that they have ceased to be the stuff of moralizing and are simply history.
    The inner pages of each journal announce the arrival of Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler and his beautiful daughter, the Princess Dag Regent, Degregene, Dahgreejuhnt, widow of Napoleon’s famed marshal, daughter-in-law of the Emperor Napoleon III, intimate of the Empress Eugénie ... a jumble of information, mostly false.
    But I was pleased that my support of Governor Tilden was everywhere noted. Less pleased to read of the “florid, portly novelist whose fame in Europe is far greater than it is here in what was once his native land.” This from the Sun .Although I have written a novel, my “fame” ought to be more considerable here than in France where I publish seldom, unlike England where I used often to publish. Now I know how those acquaintances of my youth, Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper, felt upon their respective returns to these States after so many years abroad: Welcome home, traitor, was the tone then—is the tone now.
    Suffering a pang of hunger (hominy and milk is not my idea of the perfect breakfast), I made my way to the buffet table—or “free lunch counter,” as the waiter called it, giving me a speculative look that seemed to say, Is this a “dead head” (new expression to me—it means one who travels on a railroad pass or goes to the theatre free)? and will he, for the price of one stein of beer, eat three meals? I daresay the state of my finances make me oversensitive.
    I indicated, modestly, a tureen of chipped beef. The waiter filled my plate. “That about the size of it?”
    Another new expression. I must make up a glossary. “Yes, that is exactly the right size of it.” I suspect that I gave the wrong response.
    On my way back to the blessed table beside the rack of newspapers, I was stopped by two men who had been seated at the opposite end of the long dim bar.
    “Mr. Schuyler?” asked the younger of the two, an elegantly turned-out young gentleman with a full moustache, and what looked to be a black orchid in his buttonhole.
    “Sir?” I felt a fool, as the chipped beef slopped ever so slightly onto my thumb.
    “You don’t remember me.” And of course for a moment I did fail to recognize the one man in New York I ought always to remember, for it was none other than the exquisite athlete, yachtsman, equestrian, millionaire publisher— my publisher, James Gordon Bennett, Junior, of the New York Herald , in whose pages my reports from Europe have been appearing for close to forty years.
    “Sorry, Jamie! Forgive me. I’m just off the boat. A dazzled immigrant.” I played the part of foolish elder sage, of Falstaff to Jamie’s Prince Hal—except he is now king in his own right, for his grim Scots father, who started the Herald as a penny horror in ’35, died three years ago, leaving Jamie as the sole