The Houseguest from Hell (Dickens vs. Andersen)

Be careful meeting your heroes. But be even more careful when inviting them to stay at your house.
In 1857, Hans Christian Andersen (the Danish author of The Little Mermaid) was invited to visit his idol, Charles Dickens, at his home in England. Dickens, being polite, expected a weekend visit.
Andersen arrived… and stayed for five weeks.
It was a disaster. Andersen was socially awkward, spoke terrible English, and had zero self-awareness. On the first morning, he reportedly threw a tantrum on the front lawn, face down in the grass, sobbing because someone had given him a bad review.
He demanded that Dickens’s sons shave him every morning (he refused to do it himself). He stopped Dickens from writing. He bored the family to tears. When he finally packed his bags to leave, the Dickens family probably threw a party.
After Andersen left, Charles Dickens walked into the guest bedroom, took a card, and pinned it to the mirror. It read: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!”
Andersen never understood why Dickens stopped writing back to his letters. The moral of the story: Fish and houseguests stink after three days. Even if they wrote The Ugly Duckling.