"Parvenu" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... excuse the reminder that the sense in which we (almost exclusively) use this word, and which it had gained in French itself by the time of Talleyrand's famous double-edged sarcasm on person and world (Il n'est pas parvenu: il est arrive), was not quite original. The parvenu was simply a person who had "got on": the disobliging slur of implication on his former position, and perhaps on his means of freeing himself from it, came later. It is doubtful whether there is much, if indeed there is any, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... property, and augmenting her resources, the Countess thought she might trust herself again in Paris, though a parvenu filled the throne which, in her view, was justly the property of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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
... 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 pictures, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... roll out sonorously that, "It is the Ko-to-yah Congo." "It is the river of Congo-land." Alas for our classic dreams! Alas for Crophi and Mophi, the fabled fountains of Herodotus! Alas for the banks of the river where Moses was found by the daughter of Pharaoh! This is the parvenu Congo! Then we glided on and on past strange nations and cannibals—not past those nations which have their heads under their arms—for 1,100 miles, until we arrived at the circular extension of the river and my last remaining companion called it the Stanley ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... 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 that same English ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... hither from Rimini by the ridiculously old-fashioned father to expiate his sins—his gambling debts, his multifarious and costly love-adventures, and the manslaughter of a carpenter whom he ran over in his car. [6] My favourite is a fat creature with a glorious fleshy face, the face of some Neronian parvenu—a memorable face, full of the brutal prosperity of Trimalchio's Banquet. He told me, yesterday, a long story about a local saint in one of their villages—a saint of yesterday who, curing diseases ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan |
