"Parvenu" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... viewed reveals two characteristic attitudes of mind, the blending of which is apparent throughout the Eskimo culture of to-day. There is the attitude of condescension, the arrogant tolerance of the proselyte and the parvenu: "So our forefathers used to do, for they were ignorant folk." At times, however, it is with precisely opposite view, mourning the present degeneration from earlier days, "when men were yet skilful rowers in 'kayaks,' ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... Kennel Club Show; the biggest society event of the year among dogs. It was a more exclusive assembly than any of the purely human sort, because every dog, among all the thousands there assembled, was an aristocrat with a pedigree as long as his body. There was not a parvenu among them all; and there are no human assemblies about which ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... order to escape the cacoethes loquendi of case lawyers and presuming juniors. Legal lore was builded up like the massive stone and hard grained mortar of the edifices of that olden time—slowly, carefully, but lastingly; not as are builded now the brick and stuccoed mansions of the snob and parvenu. Not that abounding treatises and familiarizing digests forbid the idea of the perfect lawyer now-a-days: only that to-day the law student in the midst of a large library stands more in need (when thinking of the otium which accompanies certain dignity), to utter the ejaculation, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Susie. And now she found herself getting interested on her own account. She had once supposed that it had been through Mrs. Mosby's agency that she had been apprised. It now appeared that someone else—an outsider and a parvenu at that—had linked her name with that of Joe Hooper's to send her word through him. It gave her rank displeasure. To be officially tagged as "Such and such" by a "one-horse" little town. Yes it was a "one-horse" little town. Her assurance slipped from ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... been preserved and the doctrines elaborated to which the inhabitants of Mesopotamia owed the superiority of their civilization. The Assyrians invented nothing. Assur himself seems only to have been a secondary form of some Chaldaean divinity, a parvenu carried to the highest place by the energy and good fortune of the warlike people whose patron he was, and maintained there until the final destruction of their capital city. When Nineveh fell, Assur fell with her, while those gods ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... countess who does it all. She furnished the rooms; she selected the male domestic, whose excellent training and intelligence you must have observed; it was she who arranged the menu of that dinner; in short, she is the providence of the parvenu colony, which, without her intervention, would have made the whole quarter laugh at it. And—now this is a very noticeable thing—instead of being a parasite like la Peyrade, this Hungarian lady, who seems to have a fortune of her own, proves to be not only disinterested, but generous. The two ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... this fortnight. I think there are but eleven parts of Marianne, and that it breaks off in the nun's story, which promised to be very interesting. Marivaux never finished Marianne, nor the Paysan Parvenu (which was the case too with the younger Cr'ebillon with Les Egaremens.) I have seen two bad conclusions of Marianne by other hands. Mr. Cumberland's brusquerie is not worth notice, nor did I remember it. Mr. Pennant's ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Phipps, Frick, and Schwab—are still living and some of them are even now extremely active. Thirty-five years ago steel manufacture was regarded, even in this country, as an almost exclusively British industry. In 1870 the American steel maker was the parvenu of the trade. American railroads purchased their first steel rails in England, and the early American steel makers went to Sheffield for their expert workmen. Yet, in little more than ten years, American mills were selling agricultural machinery in ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... and punctilious than the Marquis of Suffolk to the two princesses, and indeed to every one of his own degree; but there was something of the parvenu about him, and, unlike the Duke of York or Archbishop Stafford, who were free, bright, and good-natured to the meanest persons, he was haughty and harsh to every one below the line of gentle blood, and in his own train he kept up a discipline, not too strict ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to gabble. All that world of great and small pretensions, that world of insolence and humble desires, of envy and cringing, all that is gilded or tarnished, young or old, noble of yesterday or noble from the fourth century, all that sneers at a parvenu, all that fears to commit itself, all that wants to demolish power and worships power if it resists,—all those ears hear, all those tongues say, all those minds know, in a single evening, where the new-comer ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... de Villefranche who spoke, a little haughtily, with a certain ironical condescension towards the rich parvenu, who was about to have the honour of crossing swords with one of the noblest ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... blood in his veins, he could not endure the sedentary toil of creative art and so remained a man of action, exaggerating, for the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters, turning their easel painting into painted scenes. He was a parvenu, but a parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in 'The House of Pomegranates' to a lady of title, it was but to show that he was Jack and the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever hear him say ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... son of the revolution should ally himself with a branch of the "corporation of tyrants." His marriage, in a word, was universally admitted to be a capital error in his political career. Mignet says:—"Napoleon quitted his position and part as a parvenu and revolutionary monarch, who had been acting in Europe against the ancient courts, as the republic had acted against the ancient governments; he placed himself in a bad situation with respect to Austria, which he ought to have crushed after his victory of Wagram, or to have re-established ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it would not be a proverb in all languages. You will be an exception, Francis. You will have my uncle's real kindness without his crotchets and his dictatorial manner. You must not be offended if I call you a parvenu in spite of your birth. You have come suddenly into wealth that you were not ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... antiquated or promise no good. Noxious as well as beneficial forces have been introduced into the social life of the country and are beginning to make themselves felt. German home-life is ceasing to be the admirable and exemplary thing it was before the present era of class rivalry, commercialism, the parvenu and the snob. The idealism which made the Empire a possibility is passing away. There is need, and a general demand, for franchise reform in Prussia, and a change in the spirit of Prussian bureaucratic administration would be acceptable, though it is, perhaps, hopeless ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... but it is also their interest and millennial habit to secure control of every important religious movement and to incorporate rather than suppress. And this incorporation is more than mere recognition: the parvenu god borrows something from the manners and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced. The greater he grows, the more considerable is the process of fusion and borrowing. Hindu philosophy ever seeks for the one amongst the many and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... effect on Harold, producing a certain self-conceit and perkiness that called for physical correction. But even in our admonishment we were on his side; and as we distrustfully eyed these new arrivals, old Saturn himself seemed something of a parvenu. Even strangers, however, we may develop into sworn comrades; and these gay swordsmen, after all, were of the right stuff. Perseus, with his cap of darkness and his wonderful sandals, was not long in winging his way to our hearts; Apollo knocked at Admetus' gate in something ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... where 'there was an open traffic in benefices; the Episcopate was nothing but a secular dignity; it was necessary to be count or marquis in order to become a successor of the apostles, unless some extraordinary event snatched some little bishopric for a parvenu from the hands of the minister;' and where 'the bishops squandered the revenues of their provinces at the court.'[706] If the lower classes were neglected here, they were not, as in France, dying from ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... You will not get another husband like him. He had one quality not easily met with—modesty. In spite of the money that he made he never pretended to go out of his sphere; he always showed himself respectful to his superiors. Was it not so, Saleta, that he was not one of those parvenu popinjays who, as soon as they hear the clink of money in their pockets, forget all about profits and percentage, as if they had never gone in for them. Valero, sit down and say if this trick will be mine. Have you come to settle here, child? or are ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... here be well to add that the Baron's house preserved all its magnificence in the eyes of Lisbeth Fischer, who was not struck, as the parvenu perfumer had been, with the penury stamped on the shabby chairs, the dirty hangings, and the ripped silk. The furniture we live with is in some sort like our own person; seeing ourselves every day, we end, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... exclaiming now and then, as a shriek escapes from whipped and bleeding Hungary, a groan from gasping Poland, and a half-stifled curse from downtrodden but scowling Italy, "Confound the revolutionary canaille, why can't it be quiet!" in a word, putting one in mind of the parvenu in the "Walpurgis Nacht." The writer is no admirer of Gothe, but the idea of that parvenu was certainly a good one. Yes, putting one in mind of ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the palace. The first floor, worthy of the antique glories of Venice, displayed to Emilio's waking eyes the magnificence of which he had just been dreaming, and the fairy had exercised admirable taste. Splendor worthy of a parvenu sovereign was to be seen even in the smallest details. Emilio wandered about without remark from anybody, and surprise ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... invited the former Viscountess de Beauharnais, with her daughter, to their evening receptions; but they carefully avoided being present at the evening circles of Madame Bonaparte, where their exclusiveness was beset with the danger of coming in contact with some "parvenu," or with some sprig of the army, or of the financial bureaus. Josephine therefore had to recruit her troops herself in the Faubourg St. Germain, so as to bring into her saloon the necessary contingent of the old legitimist aristocracy, and she found what she ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... how the unaccustomed deference with which the first consul elected to be treated was viewed in the nature of a farce by those surrounding him. Everyone of any rank who employed the titles by which the parvenu monarch desired to be called, did so as a recognised jest. "Sa Majeste Imperiale et puis du rire!" But if that phase had now gone by and the boldest in France had learnt to quail before the piercing glance of the usurper, there remained apparently a few stout ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... villages, which together were represented in those days by four members of Parliament. Old Lady Molesworth, Sir Louis's remarkable mother, who when she was ninety-five was as vigorous as most women of sixty, looked on any landowner as a parvenu who had not been a territorial magnate before the days of Henry VIII. When I think of these people and their surroundings I am reminded of an opinion I once expressed to an artist well known as a luminary ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... help saying something you will not like to hear. It is a very fine church, no doubt, but it always angers me to hear of a case like this where some ancient church is pulled down and a grand new one raised in its place to the honour and glory of some rich parvenu with or ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... who that day had been reading the last French novel and could interpret every word and tone smiled slyly at each other or held themselves still to hear the sequel; the ill-bred turned round and stared; the parvenu sitting at the head of the table, who had been a foreign buyer of some London firm, chuckled coarsely and winked at the waiter, and Baron, the Afrikander trader, who sat next to Telford, ordered champagne on the strength of it. The bronzed, weather worn face of ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... the Schoonmakers, an elderly gentleman and his wife, who dined out a great deal, and lived on the ancient respectability of their family. They talked much about "the old New Yorkers," and of the inroads and devastations of the parvenu. They were thoroughly posted on old family estates and mansions, the intermarriages of the Dutch aristocracy, and the subject of heraldry. Mr. Schoonmaker made a hobby of old Bibles, and Mrs. Schoonmaker of old lace. The two hobbies combined gave a mingled air of erudition and gentility ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... up such a headless howl, That all the Saints came out and took him in; And there he sits by Saint Paul, cheek by jowl;[gn] That fellow Paul—the parvenu! The skin[511] Of Saint Bartholomew, which makes his cowl In heaven, and upon earth redeemed his sin, So as to make a martyr, never sped Better than did this ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... intensity in order to attract public notice. The painting of Mme. Henriette Browne is at an equal distance from grandeur and insipidity, from power and affectation, and gathers from the just balance of her nature some effects of taste and charm of which a parvenu ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... greatest and bitterest enemy—the wicked and unprincipled parvenu who has cost me so many tears, my people so many lives, and who has robbed me of one of the fairest jewels in ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Ball, to have Sir John Ball summoned into court and examined about the money, to hear some truculent barrister tell Sir John Ball that he could not conceal himself from the scorn of an indignant public behind the spangles of his parvenu baronetcy. He had a feeling that the lion would be torn to pieces, if only a properly truculent barrister could be got to fix his claws into him. But, unfortunately, no lawyer,—not even Solomon Walker, the Low Church attorney at Littlebath,—would ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... and baseness developed by this sort of adventures. There are, among such gutter-snipes, thousands whose luck ends in the native gutter, half a dozen whose luck lands them into millions, one or two at most who, on the top of such a career go crazy with the ambition of the parvenu and propose to direct the State. Even when gambling adventurers of this sort are known and responsible (as they are in professional politics) their power is a grave danger. Possessing as the newspaper owners do every ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... the magnificent library he would gather for himself. And it should be in no wise for show—the gross ostentation of the unlettered parvenu—but a genuine library, which should minister to his own individual culture. The thought took instant hold upon his interest. By that road, his progress to the goal of gentility would be smooth and ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... know you would. Yet I suppose no competent judge of literature will pretend that the novels of Marivaux—to say nothing of the comedies—are inferior to those of Mr. Wells. Pray read again "Le Paysan Parvenu"—all except the eighth and last part, about which I can't help thinking there is some mystery—and then try "Mr. Britling." But if by Mr. Bennett's standards we are to give Marivaux his due, what is there left ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... be suffering from gout and other infirmities. The flower of Castilian nobility followed the Emperor on this holy enterprise and was duly lodged in the dwellings of the Majorcan caballeros. The house of Febrer received as guest a parvenu noble, but recently risen from obscurity, whose achievements in a far off country, and whose visible riches, aroused both enthusiasm and criticism. It was the Marquis del Valle de Huaxaca, Hernando Cortes, who, having just conquered Mexico, had come with the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... noble rank, the young and beautiful Eugenie de Montijo, dutchess of Teba. At the same time he proclaimed that, "A sovereign raised to the throne by a new principle should remain faithful to that principle, and in the face of Europe frankly accept the position of a parvenu, which is an honorable title when it is obtained by the public suffrage of a great people. For seventy years all princes' daughters married to rulers of France have been unfortunate; only one, Josephine, was remembered with affection by the ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... dwells a long time on salacious equivocation, or on a scene of lewdness. Crudity with him is not extenuated by malice or glossed over by elegance. He is neither refined nor pungent; is quite incapable, like the younger Crebillon, of depicting the scapegrace of ability. He is a new-comer, a parvenu in standard society; you see in him a commoner, a powerful reasoner, an indefatigable workman and great artist, introduced, through the customs of the day, at a supper of fashionable livers. He engrosses the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Queen, he turned his coat from Whig to Tory; but no one familiar with the politics of the time will regard this as an unusual offense. It must also be remembered that Akenside possessed a delicate constitution, keen senses, and irritable nerves; and that he was a parvenu, lacking the power of self-control even among strangers. These traits explain, though they do not excuse, his bad temper to the unclean and disagreeable patients of the hospital, and they mitigate the fact that his industry was paralyzed by material prosperity, and his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... for if peace obtained by glory and strength is great, fruitful, and magnificent, peace yielded by weakness and cowardice is sterile, disastrous, and dishonoring. The son of a workman, Pierre Simon still further admired the Emperor, because that imperial parvenu had always known how to make that popular heart beat nobly, and, remembering the people, from the masses of whom he first arose, had invited them fraternally to share in regal ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... 1796, and April seventh, 1797, Bonaparte humbled the most haughty dynasty in Europe, toppled the central European state system, and initiated the process which has given a predominance apparently final to Prussia, then considered but as a parvenu. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of those great personages whose understandings were too sublime to taste anything but tragedy, and in many others. The same mistakes may likewise be observed in Scarron, the Arabian Nights, the History of Marianne and le Paisan Parvenu, and perhaps some few other writers of this class, whom I have not read, or do not at present recollect; for I would by no means be thought to comprehend those persons of surprizing genius, the authors of immense ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... parvenu a participer a la beatitude de l'empire de Soukhawatee, voulant un jour offrir au Bouddha un sacrifice des fleurs, depecha quelques-uns des siens aux bords de la mer des PADMA (Lotus), pour y cueillir de ces fleurs. Ses envoyes apercurent dans la mer une tres grande tige de Lotus au ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... sea-banks' but in rhythm, in vocabulary; for the ear must notice slight variations upon old cadences and customary words, all that high breeding of poetical style where there is nothing ostentatious, nothing crude, no breath of parvenu or journalist. ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... cared to look back to the beginning of his career. They overlooked the fact that it was creditable to him to have risen from the ranks, though the rise was only in wealth, for Mr. Fletcher was a purse-proud parvenu, who owed all the consideration he enjoyed to his commercial position. Fitz liked to have it understood that he was of patrician lineage, and carefully ignored the little grocery, and certain country relations who occasionally paid a visit to their wealthy relatives, in spite of the rather frigid ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... this subject, suggests that it is the parvenu in us that is reluctant to own our lowly progenitors, the pride of family and position, like that of would-be aristocratic sons who conceal the humble origin of their parents. But it is more than that; it is the old ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... back in his place, and, if need be, of doing without him. The moment has come to think less, to aim less high, to look more closely, to observe better, to paint as well but differently. This is the painting of the crowd, of the townsman, the workman, the parvenu, the man in the street; done wholly for him, done from him. It is a question of becoming humble before humble things, small before small things, subtle before subtle things; of gathering them all together without omission and without ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... sanctions which once ruled human conduct and gave a living force to public opinion. Religion in these days is obviously too complaisant. To watch the Church in the world is to be reminded of a poor relation from the provinces sitting silent and overawed in the gilded drawing-room of a parvenu. There is no sound of confidence in her voice. She whines for the world's notice instead of denouncing its very obvious sins. She is too much in this world, and too little in the other. She is too careful not to offend ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... every official stood with open hand and hungry eyes. This state of things was directly due to Napoleon's policy of attaching everybody to himself by personal ties, and in giving he had the lavish hand of a parvenu. The recipients were never content, hoarding their fees, and becoming opulent, pursuing all the time each his personal ambitions, and ofttimes returning insolence for favors. To meet these enormous expenditures there had been inaugurated throughout Europe a system of what may be termed private ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Examples may sometimes be seen of a very rich man who imagines that he can obtain from life real enjoyment in proportion to his wealth and who uses it for purely selfish purposes. We may find this in the almost insane extravagance of vulgar ostentation by which the parvenu millionaire tries to gratify his vanity and dazzle his neighbours; in the wild round of prodigal dissipation and vice by which so many young men who have inherited enormous fortunes have wrecked their constitutions and found a speedy ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Stirling, Mrs. Billington, Mrs. Drew, Mrs. Phillips, and Madam Ponisi, has seen no superior to Mrs. Gilbert in her special walk. She was in youth a beautiful dancer, and all her motions have spontaneous ease and grace. She can assume the fine lady, without for an instant suggesting the parvenu. She is equally good, whether as the formal and severe matron of starched domestic life, or the genial dame of the pantry. She could play Temperance in The Country Squire, and equally she could play Mrs. Jellaby. ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... havin' a father before you," said the Major. "I'm a parvenu with my chaps. I've only been twenty years in the regiment, and my revered parent he was a simple squire. There's no getting at the bottom of a Bhil's mind. Now, why is the superior bearer that young Chinn brought with him fleeing across country ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... did she do? of course she married her father's man. Why, Mr. Foker sate for Drummington till the Reform Bill, and paid dev'lish well for his seat, too. And you may depend upon this, sir, that Foker senior, who is a parvenu, and loves a great man, as all parvenus do, has ambitious views for his son as well as himself, and that your friend Harry must do as his father bids him Lord bless you! I've known a hundred cases of love in young men and women: hey, Master ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fittings-up of his rooms, in the fancied splendor of his bijouterie, &c. Yet it was easy for a man of any experience to read two facts in all this idle etalage; one being, that his finery was but of a second-rate order; the other, that he was a parvenu, not at home even amongst his second-rate splendor. So far there was nothing to distinguish Mr. W—'s papers from the papers of other triflers. But in this point there was, viz., that in his judgments upon the great Italian masters of painting, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... any town in England has so many remains of the remote past in its vicinity as Dorchester. Probably the Roman settlement of Durnovaria was a parvenu town to the Celts, whose closely adjacent Dwrinwyr was also an upstart in comparison with the fortified stronghold two miles away to the south; the "place by the black water" being an initial attempt to establish a trading centre by a people rather timidly learning from their Phoenician ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... ordinary way, with brass plate and bell pull. It was in a neighborhood not plebeian enough to induce butcher boys to enter the hall, with the pork and potatoes, nor admit of the servant girl heaving "slops" out of the front windows; yet not sufficiently parvenu to impress pedlers and ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... marriage. He divorced Josephine that he might give an heir to the empire, and married, on the 1st of April, 1810, Marie-Louise, arch-duchess of Austria. This was a decided error. He quitted his position and his post as a parvenu and revolutionary monarch, opposing in Europe the ancient courts as the republic had opposed the ancient governments. He placed himself in a false situation with respect to Austria, which he ought either to have crushed after the victory of Wagram, or to have reinstated ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... for grandeurs and for princesses. She did not neglect so good an opportunity to air her monkey-development theories. He merrily flung back the ball; he declared that he should prefer to be a fallen angel rather than a perfected monkey; that in his estimation a parvenu made a much sorrier figure in the world than the descendent of an old family of ruined nobility. She replied that she was more democratic than he. "It is pleasant to me," said she, "to think that I am a progressive ape, who has a wide future before ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... more attention to the names given me, and especially to announce them more naturally. That command, uttered in a loud voice at the door of the reception-room with unnecessary brutality, annoyed me exceedingly, and prevented me—shall I confess it?—from pitying the vulgar parvenu when I learned, during the evening, what sharp thorns had found their way into his ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... going to tell you about my social adventures. Who do you think I've been chumming with? Sir Luke Griffin—the great Sir Luke. He's asked me down to his place in Leicestershire, and I think I shall go. He's really a very nice fellow. I always imagined him loud, vulgar, the typical parvenu. Nothing of the kind—no one would guess that he began life in a grocer's shop. Why, he can talk quite decently about ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... that more than the walk was spoiled: suddenly her life seemed to be spoiled, too; though she did not view the ruin with complaisance. These Lamb women thought her and her cane ridiculous, did they? she said to herself. That was their parvenu blood: to think because a girl's father worked for their grandfather she had no right to be rather striking in style, especially when the striking WAS her style. Probably all the other girls and women ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... power, consideration, and convenience which exactly hit the ideal of Mr. Temple, and to the fascination of which perhaps the taste of few men would be insensible. Mr. Temple being a man of family, had none of the awkward embarrassments of a parvenu to contend with. 'It was the luckiest thing in the world,' he would say, 'that poor Sir Temple was my grandfather's godson, not only because in all probability it obtained us his fortune, but because he bore the name of Temple: we shall settle down in Yorkshire scarcely as strangers, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... acquirements. It is to be observed that they assert no more than their information permits them to, and their personality is easily discoverable by the manner in which they present their knowledge. The self-taught man is in the end only the parvenu of knowledge, and just as the parvenu, as such, rarely conceals his character, so the autodidact rarely conceals ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... thing is that which really has in it something of that to which it belongs, which describes and classifies it, and is its spoken representative; while the appellation is only a title conferred by act of Parliament or her Majesty's good pleasure: it cannot make a parvenu ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... can be a living protest against the tyranny and lust of money, which are eating away the heart and destroying the soul of Christendom. He can stand for the sane and rational ideas and habits of life, without which society but personifies the unscrupulous and vulgar parvenu. And in religion he can accept the teaching and obey the commands of Christ without any overwhelming temptation to escape them behind some exegetical device or the plea of expediency. He can devote the rose bloom ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... this description low; I do not envy them their gentility, and have always observed through life (as, to be sure, every other GENTLEMAN has observed as well as myself) that it is your parvenu who stickles most for what he calls the genteel, and has the most squeamish abhorrence for what is frank and natural. Let us pass at once, however, as all the world must be pleased, to a recital of an affair which ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unsportsmanlike. (3) A very natural jovial man, not above "changing countenance" when fine meats were set on his table:—a thing that directly contradicts the idea of a cold, ever play-acting Confucius. A parvenu must be very careful; but a scion of the House of Shang, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, could unbend and be jolly without loss of dignity;—and, were he a Confucius, would. "A gentleman," said he, "is calm and spacious"; he was himself, according to the Analects, friendly, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... father's workshop—a white wooden table and a mahogany bureau. Everything about me has its origin there. On that table my father made figures for forty years; at first in a little room, then in the apartment where I was born. We were not very wealthy then. I am a parvenu's daughter, or a conqueror's daughter, it's all the same. We are people of material interests. My father wanted to earn money, to possess what he could buy—that is, everything. I wish to earn and keep—what? I do not know—the happiness that I have—or that I have not. I have my own way of being ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "efficient" and smug. Time after time I have watched him serving some furred and jewelled customer who was not fit to exchange words with him; I have seen him jostled in a crowded aisle by some parvenu ignoramus who knew not that this quiet little man was one of the immortal spirits of gentleness and breeding who associate in quiet hours with the unburied dead of English letters. That corner of the store, near the front door, can never be ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... ever displayed, spread out its treasures before the envious eyes of militant nations, practically undefended, save for its slender ring of circling ships. There it lay, a constant and irresistible lure, especially to that parvenu and predatory Germanic Power which had appeared upon the European scene, as the offspring of treachery and violence, in 1871. Thus those politicians—they were to be found in all parties—who refused to face the new conditions, who ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... her annual visit, sits in her carriage and sends in her card with the lower right hand corner turned down, which signifies that she has "called in person;" Mrs. B: sends down word that she is "engaged" or "wishes to be excused"—or if she is a Parvenu and low-bred, she perhaps sends word that she is "not at home." Very good; Mrs. A. drives, on happy and content. If Mrs. A.'s daughter marries, or a child is born to the family, Mrs. B. calls, sends in her card with the upper left hand ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the sake of the beauty of the vines that have overrun them. Many people imagine that falsehoods may become respectable on account of age, that a certain reverence goes with antiquity, and that if a mistake is covered with the moss of sentiment it is altogether more credible than a parvenu fact. They endeavor to introduce the idea of aristocracy into the world of thought, believing, and honestly believing, that a falsehood long believed is far superior to a truth ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll |
