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Try to make that little simpleton understand that when she had a chance to unite herself with true talent she ought to have felt highly honored! But, above all, try to make her miserable, odious family and surroundings understand it! Enriched bourgeois, parvenus! there's the roof beneath which you think to rest from your cruel labor and your many trials!
Friday we saw beauty, riches, fashion, luxury, and numbers at Madame Recamier's; she is a charming woman, surrounded by a group of adorers and flatterers in a room where are united wealth and taste, all of modern execution and ancient design that can contribute to its ornament a strange melange of merchants and poets, philosophers and parvenus English, French, Portuguese, and Brazilian, which formed the company; we were treated with distinguished politeness by our hostess, who concluded the evening by taking us to her box at the Opera, where, besides being in company with the most fashionable women in Paris, we were seen by Buonaparte himself, who sat opposite to us in a railed box, through which he could see, but not be seen.
In many circles there was an affectation of treating with contempt what are called the parvenus; those people who, to use M. de Talleyrand's expression, do not know how to walk upon a carpet. All this gave rise to complaints against the Faubourg St.
The result is that much ill-feeling is engendered in society, and people whom these old aristocrats call the "nouveaux riches," "parvenus," etc., are always having their feelings hurt. The fact remains that the best-bred and most truly aristocratic people do not find it necessary to hurt any one's feelings.
Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed the main object with all, among the parvenus as well as among the Licinii and Metelli; not the polished luxury which is the acme of civilization, but that sort of luxury which had developed itself amidst the decaying Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise punctiliousness, rendering it equally nauseous to the man of fresh feeling as to the man of fresh intellect.
Nevertheless, the hungry tenderfoot was quite content, and missed none of the appurtenances she had been brought up to believe essential to a civilized meal, not even the little silver jug that Aunt Martha always insisted came over with William the Conqueror—Aunt Martha scorned the May-flower contingent as parvenus.
Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth purely political.
She ridiculed keenly the pride of fools, the vanity of parvenus, and, feeling herself of the people to her very finger-ends, she thought herself more noble than all the patricians and aristocrats of the earth.
Maybe not maybe he is the choice of Don Ambrosio; who, himself of plebeian origin, is ambitious that his blood should be mingled with that of the military hidalgo. The soldier has no money beyond his pay; and that is mortgaged for months in advance; but he is a true Gachupino, of "blue blood," a genuine "hijo de algo." Not a singular ambition of the old miser, nor uncommon among parvenus.
It was her craze for high play that led her to admit not only to her court, but also to her card-table, parvenus of doubtful reputation and of questionable antecedents, such as the infamous Cagliostro, soi-disant Count of St. Germain, and others of his class, whose only merit in her eyes was that they were rich and willing to lose their money without counting it.
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