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England, in their ideas, has always been a parvenue kingdom; her nobles not able to trace farther back than the Conquest; while, in their country, the lowest baron will prove his sixteen quarters, and his descent from the darkest ages.
Smith, who was sitting on the big sofa near the window alone, looked up, and said in an odious voice, that made every one listen, "I am afraid, Harry, you have not enjoyed cooing in the moonlight; it looks as if our sweet Elizabeth had been difficult, and had boxed your ears!" That made me wild, the impudence! That parvenue calling me by my Christian name!
"Well, then, child, Wenceslas had better come with me to see the lender, who will oblige him at my request. It is Madame Marneffe. If you flatter her a little for she is as vain as a parvenue she will get you out of the scrape in the most obliging way. Come yourself and see her, my dear Hortense."
If her poor, dear papa had been alive, things of course would have been very different; and she could have had petunias, or orchids, or any of the rarest hot-house flowers she pleased; but, now, she was poor, although proud, and could not afford them like that rich parvenue. How, good things always seemed given to those who are above their need!
Parvenue, time and again, indulging a magnificent caprice with some rare luxury, upon which straitened aristocracy was bestowing covetous and admiring glances.
I care not for that, but I will overturn every thing that interposes between me and the desire I have to humble the wife of the present representative. Look, I would hold this hand in the fire, ay, and suffer it to smoulder into ashes, to punish the woman who called me a proud parvenue! She did so before I had been a week in London. Her cold calm face has been a curse to me ever since.
She found her an amiable, good-natured woman, entirely free from that offensive arrogance and patronizing condescension which usually marks the parvenue as distinct from the thoroughbred. Mrs. Ryder had no claims to distinguished lineage; on the contrary, she was the daughter of a country grocer when the then rising oil man married her, and of educational advantages she had had little or none.
What these principles are I shall endeavor to indicate; and first of the laws of the origin of symbols, the rules which guided the early intellect in choosing from the vast number of objects appealing to sense those fit to shadow forth the supernatural. It may safely be assumed that this was not done capriciously, as the modern parvenue makes for himself a heraldric device.
I knew that no one cared for me except my husband and Amante; for it was clear enough to see that I, as his wife, and also as a parvenue, was not popular among the few neighbours who surrounded us; and as for the servants; the women were all hard and impudent-looking, treating me with a semblance of respect that had more of mockery than reality in it; while the men had a lurking kind of fierceness about them, sometimes displayed even to M. de la Tourelle, who on his part, it must be confessed, was often severe even to cruelty in his management of them.
A shrewd little parvenue, that was all. He could never make his way with a wife who compromised him. She would be a stumbling-block in his path. Ah, if he had foreseen, if he had known. He would have played for higher stakes. What a brilliant match he might have made with little Suzanne! How could he have been so blind?
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