"Parvenu" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one quality not easily met with—modesty. In spite of the money that he made he never pretended to go out of his sphere; he always showed himself respectful to his superiors. Was it not so, Saleta, that he was not one of those parvenu popinjays who, as soon as they hear the clink of money in their pockets, forget all about profits and percentage, as if they had never gone in for them. Valero, sit down and say if this trick will be mine. Have you come ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... reader will perhaps 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 ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... "Our greatest and bitterest enemy—the wicked and unprincipled parvenu who has cost me so many tears, my people so many lives, and who has robbed me of one of the fairest jewels in my ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... "A parvenu, like that other ill-looking fellow who pranced on the left, with his fiery eyes and his ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... if any town in England has so many remains of the remote past in its vicinity as Dorchester. Probably the Roman settlement of Durnovaria was a parvenu town to the Celts, whose closely adjacent Dwrinwyr was also an upstart in comparison with the fortified stronghold two miles away to the south; the "place by the black water" being an initial attempt to establish a trading centre by a people rather timidly learning ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
|
