United States or Bulgaria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Million, with all the awkward feelings of a parvenue. "Do you think so?" said Vivian; "I once thought so myself, but I confess that my opinion is greatly changed. After all, what is noble blood?
Let no one neglect them who is desirous of pleasing in society; and, above all, let no one deem them unworthy of attention. They are precisely the trifles which do most to make social intercourse agreeable, and a knowledge of which distinguishes the gentlewoman from the parvenue. A morning visit should be paid between the hours of two and four p.m., in winter, and two and five in summer.
If there was a woman accustomed to dress, it was she: a splendid dry-goods store could have been set up with the silks and the velvets, the satins and cashmeres, the muslins, the laces, and all the known tissues, that had passed over her shoulders. Her elegance was quoted and copied. And yet there was about her always and under all circumstances, an indescribable flavor of the parvenue.
Arma virumque shall resound; And Horace wreathe his rhymes afresh; You'll rediscover Laura's lover; Meet Gretchen in the flesh. Oh, could I find for the first time The Churchyard Elegy again! Retaste the sweets of new-found Keats; Read Byron now as then! Make haste to wander these old roads, O envied little parvenue; For all things trite shall leap alight And bloom again for you!
This, however, was a concession to which Henry would not consent; and while the Queen persisted in not permitting the services of Madame de Richelieu, her royal bridegroom as pertinaciously negatived the appointment of parvenue lady of honour.
There were no jarring notes or lavish, tawdry display, the pitfalls into which the parvenue and petit bourgeois invariably fall. This was his only hobby, and just why he indulged it, he himself would have found it difficult to answer, for in reality, he cared but little for it. He regarded it chiefly as a precaution against old age.
Later, when pretension crept into the inferior circles which took this one for a model, the term came to mean a sort of intellectual parvenue, half prude and half pedant, who affected learning, and paraded it like fine clothes, for effect.
Guy Flouncey was seen at all the 'best balls, and was always surrounded by the 'best men. Though a flirt and a pretty woman, she was a discreet parvenue, who did not entrap the affections of noble husbands. Above all, she was the friend of Lady Kingcastle, who called her and her husband 'those good Guy Flounceys. The ball was given; you could not pass through Belgrave Square that night.
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.
"Here," writes Edmond About, "are only two categories of people, those who have made a fortune and those who are trying to make one, and the principal inhabitants are parvenus in the most honourable sense of the word." "In the most honourable sense of the word," the Cathedral of Marseilles is also typical of the city, "parvenue."
Word Of The Day