"Noblesse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the political relation of these artificers to the State was that of a caste entirely separate from the noblesse; [1] paid for their daily work what was just, and competing with each other to supply the best article they could for the money. And it is, again, impossible to overrate the difference between such a social condition, and that of the artists of to-day, struggling ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marsillac, the author of the maxims, was one of the most illustrious members of the most illustrious families among the French noblesse. Descended from the ancient Dukes of Guienne, the founder of the Family Fulk or Foucauld, a younger branch of the House of Lusignan, was at the commencement of the eleventh century the Seigneur of a small town, ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... unconscionably tedious, Smollett settles down to a capable historical summary preparatory to setting his palette for a picture of the Nissards "as they are." He was, as we are aware, no court painter, and the cheerful colours certainly do not predominate. The noblesse for all their exclusiveness cannot escape his censure. He can see that they are poor (they are unable to boast more than two coaches among their whole number), and he feels sure that they are depraved. He attributes both vices unhesitatingly to their ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... dignity, though panting from his exertions, and looking so hot that I feared an apoplexy for the old man. I did not know how tough such an old heathen is, nor that his efforts were by no means at an end. Noblesse oblige and such high caste as Palo's ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... proceedings of a family who had entered my railway carriage at Tours and had conversed unreservedly, for my benefit, all the way from that station—a family whom it entertained me to assign to the class of petite noblesse de province. Their noble origin was confirmed by the way they all "made maigre" in the refreshment-room (it happened to be a Friday), as if it had been possible to do anything else. They ate two or three omelets apiece and ever so many ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the elements of which it was made up were still more remarkable. Ministers and Opposition; ambassadors, travellers, journalists; the men of fashion and the men of reform; here a French republican official, and beyond him, perhaps, a man whose ancestors were already of the most ancient noblesse in Saint-Simon's day; artists, great and small, men of letters good and indifferent; all these had been among the guests of Madame d'Estrees, brought to the house, each of them, for some quality's sake, some power of ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... somewhat more calmly, "why M. le Comte de Cambray was opposed to our union, was purely a financial one. Our families are of equal distinction and antiquity, but alas! our fortunes are also of equal precariousness: we, Sir, of the old noblesse gave up our all, in order to follow our King into exile. Victor de Marmont was rich. His fortune could have repurchased the ancient Cambray estates and restored to that honoured name all the brilliance which it had ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... they lodged was in the lordly quartier of the Faubourg St. Germain; the neighbouring streets were venerable with the ancient edifices of a fallen noblesse; but their tenement was in a narrow, dingy lane, and the building itself seemed beggarly and ruinous. The apartment was in an attic on the sixth story, and the window, placed at the back of the lane, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Republic having abolished all titles, a peerage was, for a while, impossible. But he has formed a military Caste, which, without hazarding his popularity with the Parisians, increases his popularity with the troops, and has all the advantages of a noblesse, with all the dependency of its members on the head of the State. He has named this Institution the Legion of Honour. It is to consist of several classes, the first comprehending the great officers of state, generals who have distinguished themselves, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... stood apart near the window, "you have been a good lad in not persisting to thwart my views, but that French marquis, with his folly and his 'ancienne noblesse,' has overthrown all my plans. Now, I shall not interfere with yours. Introduce me to Miss what's her name; she is a very fine girl, and from what I saw of her during dinner, I like ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the habit is added the cross, generally worn in Europe by canonesses only: a distinction procur'd for them by their founder, St. Vallier, the second bishop of Quebec. The house is, without, a very noble building; and neatness, elegance and propriety reign within. The nuns, who are all of the noblesse, are many of them handsome, and all genteel, lively, and well bred; they have an air of the world, their conversation is easy, spirited, and polite: with them you almost forget the recluse in the woman of condition. In short, you have the best nuns at the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... days without flinching, and finally, in the early days of October, saw the Saxon Duke and his army march away, Valmy having opened the eyes of Brunswick to the utter futility and fanfaronnade of the French emigrant noblesse and princes, who had drawn up for him and persuaded him against his own better judgment to sign the too famous and fatal proclamation with which he heralded the Austro-Prussian advance into France. Mayor Andre having thus saved the grand North-eastern bulwark of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... noticed, even though to be noticed meant inevitably to be snubbed. There was a freedom about the water, an honest vulgarity, a quality as of Rabelais, refreshingly in contrast with the hot-house manners and morals of the haute noblesse. Madame need not hesitate to cross her legs, if she found that attitude comfortable; monsieur could at once remove coat, waist-coat, collar, cuffs, if he found the ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... Toussaint beheld another civil war agitating the French colony. On one side, the French Commissioners, who had acknowledged the emancipation of the slaves, maintained war for the Republic; on the other side, the old noblesse, or planters, fought under the royal banner, having called in the aid of the British forces in order to re-establish slavery and the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... like other favorites of fortune in the latter days of the monarchy, purchased his patent of noblesse. Every body knew that he was a parvenu; and rumor, as she is wont in such cases, had adorned his early history with so many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... all the noblesse of the provinces, of the environs, and wherever messengers had carried the news, were seen to arrive. D'Artagnan had shut himself up, without being willing to speak to anybody. Two such heavy deaths falling upon the captain, so closely after ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... language of the camp. Many of these young generals and heroes had married the beautiful but impoverished daughters of the aristocrats of old monarchical France. These young women, who were the representatives of the ancient noblesse, brought to the Tuileries the traditions of their mothers, and distinguished themselves by the ease of their courtly deportment and their graceful manners; and they thus unconsciously became the teachers of the other young women, who, like their ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... poems Aeclogues, from a Greek word meaning Goatherds' Tales, "Though indeed few goatherds have to do herein." He dedicated them to Sir Philip Sidney as "the president of noblesse and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... understand you," I said, with marked frigidity. "The lady I speak of lived and died under the old regime of noblesse oblige. I am not so well versed in modern social forms of morality ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... excited alarm, and was carried to the Bastile: where, to deepen the interest of the story, he sketched a variety of comedies, which he must have communicated to the governor, who, whispering it doubtless as an affair of state to several of the noblesse, these admirers of "sketches of comedies"—English ones no doubt—procured the release of this English Moliere. This tale is further confirmed by a very odd circumstance. Sir John built at Greenwich, on a spot still called "Van Brugh's ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... XIII. in a tour to Narbonne, which lasted nearly a year. Doubtless, the opportunities which this journey afforded him, of comparing the manners and follies of the royal court and of the city of Paris, with those which he found still existing in the provincial towns and among the rural noblesse, were not lost upon the poet by whose satirical power they ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Napoleon, meaning to be gracious, said to him, 'You bear a great name, Monsieur,' he had answered sweetly, 'The greatest of all, I think.' It is certain he was the head of one of the most illustrious houses in the noblesse of Europe, descended directly and legitimately, through the Bourbons, from Saint Louis of France; and, to boot, he was immensely rich, owning (it was said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... that child, and I thought of the women that I had known—the bold, bedizened beauties of a Court said to be the first in Europe. And then it came to me that this was no demoiselle of Lavedan, no demoiselle at all in fact, for the noblesse of France owned no such faces. Candour and purity were not to be looked for in the high-bred countenances of our great families; they were sometimes found in the faces of the children of their retainers. Yes; I had ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... said his brother amicably, from the head of the table, "we must care for a man when he's wounded at our door, friend or foe, Federalist or damned Republican. Noblesse oblige. I was glad enough the night my mare Nelly threw me, coming home from Maria Erskine's wedding, to hear Bob Carter's voice behind me! And if Gideon Rand was a surly old heathen, he broke colts well, and he rolled ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... this head is intolerable. Does the author recollect a single tax in England to which something parallel in nature, and as heavy in burden, does not exist in France; does he not know that the lands of the noblesse are still under the load of the greater part of the old feudal charges, from which the gentry of England have been relieved for upwards of a hundred years, and which were in kind, as well as burden, much worse than our modern land-tax? Besides that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... young braves flaunting and boastful, wearing headdresses with strings of eagle quills reaching to the ground, each quill signifying an enemy taken. Then came "the peddlers,"—the fur merchants,—unpacking their goods to tempt the Indians, men of the colonial noblesse famous in history, the Forests and Le Chesnays and Le Bers. Here, too, gorgeous in finery, bristling with firearms, were the bushrovers, the interpreters, the French voyageurs, who had to come out of the wilds once every two years to renew their licenses to ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... and the devoted fugitives who sang the psalms of Marot among rocks and caverns. Joined to these were numbers on whom the faith sat lightly, whose hope was in commotion and change. Of these, in great part, was the Huguenot noblesse, from Conde, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and was obliged to chum with a profligate valet of nineteen, and a "beggarly" bad patriot, who "blamed the conduct of France, and approved that of other nations, especially the Dutch." M. Funck-Brentano himself publishes these facts (1898), in part published earlier (1890) by M. Lair.[1] Not much noblesse here! Next, if Rosarges, a gentleman, served the Mask, Saint-Mars alone (1669) carried his food to the valet, Dauger. So the service of Rosarges does not ennoble the Mask and differentiate him from Dauger, who was even more nobly served, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... The noblesse have now quite deserted the Irish capital. Besides the lord-chancellor, there is probably not a single peer occupying a house there to-day. Houses are excellent and very cheap. An immense mansion in the best situation can be had for a thousand dollars a year. The markets are capitally ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... nearly so severely as the necessity which was on him to rectify an error made by himself. He had done a foolish thing. Under no circumstances should the chapel have been built on that spot. He knew it now, and he knew that he must apologise. Noblesse oblige. The old lord was very stupid, very wrong-headed, and sometimes very arrogant; but he would not do a wrong if he knew it, and nothing on earth would make him tell a wilful lie. The epithet indeed might have been omitted; ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... would have been transformed into minorities, if in the early days of the Revolution these unworthy men had only stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have scarcely ever been wanting in courage. The emigrant noblesse of France are almost the only instance of a great privileged and territorial caste that had as little bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is that they had been an oligarchy, not of power or duty, but of self-indulgence. They were crushed by Richelieu to secure ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... been out of France, and serving in the colonies. His character, doubtless, had been indifferent at home; and he knew that, according to the system pursued in France, where almost all promotion is given to the noblesse, he never would advance in rank. And he had made free with my guineas, I suppose, as he had with my watch, for I saw it one day on his chest when I was sitting ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... contribution. Here duke Schomberg, who commanded the auxiliaries in the English pay, published a declaration in the name of king William, inviting the people to join his standard, assuring them that his master had no other design in ordering his troops to invade France, but that of restoring the noblesse to their ancient splendour, their parliaments to their former authority, and the people to their just privileges. He even offered his protection to the clergy, and promised to use his endeavours for reviving the edict of Nantes, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... and the Code Napoleon. They are proud to transmit their title untarnished to their descendants, are ready to make serious sacrifices in its behalf, to exercise the rigid self-denials of family control for its sake, and to engrave the motto of "noblesse oblige" on their hearts in order to sustain it; but they bitterly complain that without the majorat, and the transmission of outward, visible supports in land and houses to strengthen it, the empty sound carries ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Duc de Beaumont portrays a type of the true noblesse of France—proud, fearless, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy • Steele Mackaye
... you, and I ask your pardon,"—he bowed gravely. "Miss Lingard," he went on, "is an absolutely trustful heart. She has not learned the hard lessons of life. As for you and me, noblesse oblige,"—he watched me narrowly. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... that the degenerated classicists were "barren of imagination and invention," offered in their insipid artificialities nothing but "rhetoric, bombast, fleurs de college, and Latin-verse poetry," clothed "borrowed ideas in trumpery imagery," and presented themselves with a "conventional elegance and noblesse than which there was nothing more common." On the other hand, the works of the master-minds of England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, which were more and more translated and read, opened new, undreamt-of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... gates,—when, had he held out only twenty-four hours longer, Canada might have been saved for France, as the British could not for any length of time have maintained their position on the Plains of Abraham. Returning to France, where he was related to several families of the Noblesse, who held that "war was the only worthy calling, and prized honour more than life," he received so cool a reception at Court that his proud spirit, being unable to brook the humiliation, he applied for a passport allowing ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their inter-marriages, distant relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country. But an uneducated person may know, by memory, many languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a word of any,—not a word even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way ashore at most ports; yet he has ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... d'Armont was the daughter of a landless squire of Normandy, a member of the chetive noblesse, a man of gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may have predisposed him against the law of entail or primogeniture—the prime cause of the inequality out of which were sprung so many of the evils that afflicted France. Like many of his order and condition he was among the earliest ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... which a mere stranger looking down from the terrace would never have suspected. Few of the tenements could claim to be anything better than mere farm-houses. Yet every second building you came upon was a chateau—yes, a veritable chateau, the actual abode of some seigneur of the old noblesse of France, whose name might be like enough to call up the memory of some illustrious deed done in the old chivalric days of France. The country literally swarmed with chateaux and with nobles. Do you see yon rickety, tumble-down ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... proudest heroic, and purest legislative, days of Greece, the symbol had borne for all men skilled in her traditions: to the schools of craftsmen the sign meant further their craft's noblesse, and pure descent from the divinely-terrestrial skill of Daedalus, the labyrinth-builder, and the first sculptor of imagery pathetic[48] with human ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... denominated a basse-cour (farm-yard) by the Faubourg St. Germain, and all who frequented it "les oies de Frere Philippe" or "les canards d'Orleans." The Count de Cambis appeared at that moment at the Tuileries in search of office. His name stood high in the annals of the French noblesse: society had, however, ceased to confound the gentilhomme with the roue. The conditions necessary to fulfill the character were changed, and it was now the bourgeois gentilhomme and not the gentilhomme roue whose claim to the vacant place was more likely to be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... of the trumpet announced the royal banquet. His Majesty took his seat on the dais, with the imperial crown upon his head amid the deafening shouts of the up-standing noblesse of the land. LORD GLENGALL'S seat was high up in the hall; and next to him, on one side, was the EARL OF BLESSINGTON, whom I had the honor of knowing, and the EARL OF FALMOUTH on the other, both of whom are now gathered to their fathers. They insisted upon my taking a seat ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... a supreme grandeur, "that you bear the name and title of Baron de Sainte-Hermine, that your father was guillotined on the Place de la Revolution and that your brother was killed in Conde's army. Noblesse oblige! Those ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... in political tradition, and encouraged by every gamekeeper to follow the footsteps of his ancestors, Lord Runnymede had inevitably taken "Noblesse oblige" as his private motto. But of what service was nobility if its obligations were abolished? He sometimes pictured with a shudder the fate of the surviving French nobility—retaining their titles by courtesy, and compelled ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... women, and his very shyness awakened in this married woman, the unprincipled wife of the marechal de noblesse of a district where Nekhludoff was present at an election, the desire of vanquishing him. This woman drew him into an intimacy which entangled him more and more, while it daily became more distasteful to him. Having succumbed to the temptation, Nekhludoff felt guilty, and had not the courage ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... bounced out of the room, leaving the Duke sick at heart, low in spirit, and doubtful whether he were right or wrong in his attempts to manage his wife. Surely he must be right in feeling that in his high office a clearer conduct and cleaner way of walking was expected from him than from other men! Noblesse oblige! To his uncle the privilege of returning a member to Parliament had been a thing of course; and when the Radical newspapers of the day abused his uncle, his uncle took that abuse as a thing of course. The old Duke acted after his kind, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... German Grand Duke, and above and all around was a crowd of travelers of all nations. He brought no letters. He desired no acquaintances. Florence, under the new regime, was too much agitated by recent changes for its noblesse to pay any attention to a stranger, however distinguished, unless he was forced upon them; and so Lord Chetwynde had the most complete isolation. If Hilda had ever had any ideas of going with Lord Chetwynde into Florentine society she was soon undeceived, when, as ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... the honour, he said, to be at the bombardment of it last war;—that it was finely situated, pour cela,—and full of noblesse when the Imperialists were driven out by the French (the lady made a slight courtesy)—so giving her an account of the affair, and of the share he had had in it,—he begg'd the honour to know her ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... Even Raoul's sisters had to confess, with a certain disgust, that, whatever people may say, in our own day the aristocracy of wealth has to lower its flag before the authentic quarterings of the old noblesse. They secretly envied Giselle because she was going to be a grande dame, while all the while they asserted that old-fashioned distinctions had no longer any meaning. Nevertheless, they looked forward to the day when they, too, might take their places ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... the edge of a small stone tank full of water and dabbed his swollen eye with a wet pocket-handkerchief, M. Dumollard, the mathematical master, made cheap fun of Britannic sentimentality about animals, and told us how the English noblesse were privileged to beat their wives with sticks no thicker than their ankles, and sell them "au rabais" in the horse-market of Smissfeld; and that they paid men to box each other to death on the stage of Drury Lane, and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... levies that gathered when the royal standard was raised. The Hamiltons merely looked to their own advancement; Lord James Stewart was bound to the Congregation; Huntly was a double dealer and was remote; the minor noblesse and the armed burghers, with Glencairn representing the south-west, Lollard from of old, were attached to Knox's doctrines, while the mob would flock ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang |
