"Parvenu" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unexampled opportunities for architectural improvement and greatly stimulated the public interest in the art. The feverish and abnormal industrial activity which followed the war and the rapid growth of the parvenu spirit were checked by the disastrous "panic" of 1873. With the completion of the Pacific railways and the settlement of new communities in the West, industrial prosperity, when it returned, was established on a firmer basis. An extraordinary expansion ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... the matter may be held before the Inquisition! But it is a name unknown to thee, and new to this dignity, which he weareth like a clown! The freedom is still too great for this entry to the Senate; the serrata hath done its work too lightly if it leave space for one parvenu! To-morrow, when thou takest the air in thy gondola, my Lady Laura, thou shalt look between the columns of the Ducal Palace and know whatever the State will declare to thee of that which concerneth the government alone! The times ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... energy of youth, were all found united in John Hunyady, accompanied withal by a singular talent for leadership in war. He could not rely for support upon the haughty magnates who could trace their descent back for centuries and despised the parvenu with a shorter pedigree and a smaller estate. He was consequently obliged to cast in his lot with the mass of the lesser nobility, individually weaker, it is true, but not deficient in spirit and a consciousness of their own worth. Of this class he soon became the idolized ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... this difference is 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,' or when this or that ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... bond exists between landlord and tenant. No false pride separates the one from the other—intercourse is easy, for a man of high and ancient lineage can speak freely to the humblest labourer without endangering his precedence. It needs none of the parvenu's hauteur and pomp to support his dignity. Every ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... first realistic novel, or novel of any kind, in Hebrew literature, the 'Ayit Zabua' (The Painted Vulture). His Rabbi Zadok, the miracle-worker, who exploits superstition for his own aggrandizement; Rabbi Gaddiel, the honest but mistaken henchman of Rabbi Zadok; Ga'al, the parvenu, who seeks to obliterate an unsavory past by fawning upon both; the Shadkan, or marriage-broker, who pretends to be the ambassador of Heaven, to unite men and women on earth,—in these and similar types drawn from life and depicted vividly, ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... the little tarts and the jelly, and the custard pudding, she despised altogether, regarding them as wicked additions. One pudding after dinner she would have allowed, but nothing more of that sort. It might be all very well for parvenu millionaires to have two grand dinners a-day, but it could not be necessary that the Germains should live in that way, even when the Dean of Brotherton and his aunt came to ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... afford. He was particularly desirous that Sir George and Lady Kirkbank, with Lady Lesbia, should stay at his Berkshire place during the Henley week. He had a large steam launch, and the regatta was a kind of carnival for his intimate friends, who were not too proud to riot and batten upon the parvenu's luxurious hospitality, albeit they were apt to talk somewhat ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dealings with the booksellers. Yet he was able to treat them with a sturdy spirit when they forgot themselves. Panckoucke, one of the great publishers of the time, came to him one day. "He was swollen with the arrogance of a parvenu, and thinking apparently that he could use me like one of those poor devils who depend upon him for a crust of bread, he permitted himself to fly into a passion; but it did not succeed at all. I ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... been now two years successfully busied in this way, when there came to the university a young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning—rich, said report, as Herodes Atticus—his riches, too, as easily acquired. I soon found him of weak intellect, and, of course, marked him as a fitting subject for my skill. I frequently engaged him in play, and contrived, with the gambler's ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was 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, yet dignified; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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 disdain, of ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... 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 ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Service of king and country is in their blood. They get small remuneration for their service. There is no luxury. They spurn the temptations of money. Hundreds and hundreds of them have never been inside the house of a rich parvenu, nor have their women. They work as no other servants work, they live on little, they and their women and children; and you may count yourself happily privileged if they permit you the intimacy of their ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... for his narrative, sending him a rich present, his warm approval, and the office of first civil magistrate in the city of Yakoutsk. This turned the scales wholly on one side, and Maria bowed low to Kolina. But Kolina had no feelings of the parvenu, and she was always a general favorite. Ivan accepted with pride his sovereign's favor, and by dint of assiduity, soon learned to be a useful magistrate. He always remained a good husband, a good father, and ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... a great measure with Crystal de Cambray. He certainly loved her in his way, for her beauty and her charm; but, above all, he looked on her as the very personification of the old and proud regime which had thought fit to scorn the parvenu noblesse of the Empire, and for a powerful adherent of Napoleon to be possessed of a wife out of that exclusive milieu was like a fresh and glorious trophy of war on a ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... world; that Spindler was an ostentatious fool, who had made a little money and wanted to use him to get into society; and the fun of the whole thing was that this half-uncle and whole brute is himself a parvenu,—a vulgar, ostentatious creature, who was ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... necessary, and therefore kept ready to hand, the subject of such demonstration is not yet securely known. Qui s'excuse, s'accuse; and unless a matter can hold its own without the brag and self-assertion of continual demonstration, it is still more or less of a parvenu, which we shall not lose much by neglecting till it has less occasion to blow its own trumpet. The only alternative is that it is an error in process of detection, for if evidence concerning any opinion has long been deemed superfluous, and ever after ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Agnes, sir, an exceedingly fine woman. But what 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
... 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 advise him that he had any ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... "Il est parvenu a notre connaissance que certains Juifs de nos sujets se sont plaints a plusieurs reprises a leurs freres residant en Europe et aux Representants etrangers a Tanger, de ce qu'ils ne parviennent pas a obtenir justice dans leurs reclamations relatives a meurtres, vols, &c. ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... announcing his coming marriage with Mlle. de Montijo, used the very word "parvenu" in speaking of himself and of his family. His frankness won the hearts of the French people and helped to reconcile them to a marriage in which the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... it would be impossible, to find exact equivalents in English or in German, or probably in any language: 'aplomb,' 'badinage,' 'borne,' 'chic,' 'chicane,' 'cossu,' 'coterie,' 'egarement,' 'elan,' 'espieglerie,' 'etourderie,' 'friponnerie,' 'gentil,' 'ingenue,' 'liaison,' 'malice,' 'parvenu,' 'persiflage,' 'prevenant,' 'ruse,' 'tournure,' 'tracasserie,' 'verve.' It is evident that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Mexico. The rich merchant may be one of the "familias principales." Although there is still an old noblesse in the Mexican republic, the titles are merely given by courtesy, and those who hold them are often outranked and eclipsed in style by the prosperous parvenu. ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... Americans, everywhere Americans; rich and poor Americans, loud and quiet Americans; Americans who had taste and education, and some who had neither; well-dressed and over-dressed, obtrusive and unobtrusive, parvenu and aristocrat. Once Merrihew saw a fine old gentleman wearing the Honor Legion ribbon in his buttonhole, and his heart grew warm and proud. Here was an order which was not to be purchased like the Order of Leopold and the French Legion of Honor. To win this simple order a man must prove his ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... 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 power of concealment and, at ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... doubtful if 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 ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... than 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 of ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... great quality which man could possess. His enemies were ready enough to allow his military talents, but they wished to attribute the first success of his not very deep policy to a marvellous duplicity, apparently considered by them the more wicked as possessed by a parvenu emperor, and far removed, in a moral point of view, from the statecraft so allowable in an ancient monarchy. But for Napoleon himself and his family and Court there was literally no limit to the really marvellous inventions ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... they would have a descendant of a royal house to be their king or emperor. Alas! the Bonaparte has left us, and besides, he was not the descendant of a royal house, and was, like the present Emperor of the French, a decided parvenu. Still, the Emperor of the French, if only a parvenu, bears himself right imperially among sovereigns, and has no peer among any of the descendants of the old ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... returned, "I can't 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 without ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... uniformity had been only in their outside crust and shell. What tore the nation to pieces during the Reign of Terror, but the boundless variety and originality of the characters which found themselves suddenly in free rivalry? What else gave to the undisciplined levies, the bankrupt governments, the parvenu heroes of the Republic, a manifold force, a self-dependent audacity, which made them the conquerors, and the teachers (for good and evil) of the civilised world? If there was one doctrine which the ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... to have existed, a creature of such vast antiquity that it deserves all the respect which the parvenu man can summon and offer to it, was—a cockroach. This, the father of all black-beetles, probably walked the earth in solitary magnificence when not only kitchens, but even kitchen-middens were undreamt of, possibly millions of years before ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... dynastic incidents which are of such vast importance under an absolute despotism. One of Napoleon's main objects was to establish a Napoleonic Dynasty and to be adopted by marriage into one of the ruling families of Europe. The Corsican parvenu passionately desired a matrimonial alliance with the House of Romanov, and repeatedly applied for the hand of one of Alexander's sisters; the dowager Tsarina, Alexander's mother, a daughter of the King of Wuertemberg, as persistently refused. She had all the pride of birth of a ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... revolutionize, exclaiming now and then, as a shriek escapes from whipped and bleeding Hungary, a groan from gasping Poland, and a half-stifled curse from down-trodden 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 ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the possessions of an illustrious ancestry are about to slide from out your line for ever; that the numerous tenantry, who look up to you with the confiding eye that the most liberal parvenu cannot attract, will not count you among their lords; that the proud park, filled with the ancient and toppling trees that your fathers planted, will yield neither its glory nor its treasures to your seed, and that the old gallery, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... her. She must be the most whimsical little aristocrat imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, but she never got over leaving London and the fashionable world, and is as hungry now, after her long fast, for titles and big-wigs, as though she were the purest parvenu. The squire of course makes mock of her, and she has no influence with him. However, there is something naive in the stories they tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with her. But ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heavy expenses. Neither husband nor wife considered money when it was a question of giving pleasure to their child, from whom they had never been willing to separate. Imagine the happiness of the poor parvenu peasant as he listened to his charming Cesarine playing a sonata of Steibelt's on the piano, and singing a ballad; or when he found her writing the French language correctly, or reading Racine, father ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... 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, like the Baron, by thinking ourselves ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Galinee and his party to the Saut Ste. Marie, where "les Jesuites les congedierent." It then proceeds as follows: "Cependant Mr. de la Salle continua son chemin par une riviere qui va de l'est a l'ouest; et passe a Onontaque (Onondaga), puis a six ou sept lieues au-dessous du Lac Erie; et estant parvenu jusqu'au 280me ou 83me degre de longitude, et jusqu'au 4lme degre de latitude, trouva un sault qui tombe vers l'ouest dans un pays has, marescageux, tout couvert de vielles souches, don't il y en a quelquesunes qui sont encore sur pied. Il fut done contraint de prendre terre, et suivant une ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... 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 |
