"Bourgeois" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... magnificent salon of the hotel—all gold mirrors and mouldiness—which the poor country mouse vaguely accepted as part of the glories of Paris and success. Madame Depine would don her ponderous gold brooch, sole salvage of her bourgeois prosperity; while, if the visitor were for Madame Valiere, that grande dame would hang from her yellow, shrivelled neck the long gold chain and the old-fashioned watch, whose hands still seemed to point ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... occurred. Later, when his three children were growing up, and he seemed a staid, almost middle-aged man, he turned after strange women, and became a silent, inscrutable follower of forbidden pleasure, neglecting his indignant bourgeois wife without a qualm. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... showed the double aspect which has distinguished it ever since. To the minds of some it was the faith of the insurrectionist, something to be achieved by force; "bourgeois" society must be overthrown by force of arms; if open and fair fighting was not possible against such great odds, it must be blown skyhigh with gunpowder. Dynamite, by the good fortune of invention, came to the revolutionary at the ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... sex through bitter experience. There were many men who believed in sex-equality as a matter of words, but had no real conception of it in action; as for the women—well, you might see right here in the local the most narrow, bourgeois ideas dominating their minds. Jimmie did not know what ideas Comrade Baskerville meant, but he knew that her voice was musical and full of quick ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... mentioned it because you understand life and I must speak to someone who judges more liberally than our narrow minded bourgeois. ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... the nobles and upper clergy on the one hand and the peasant-born lower clergy and the masses of the people on the other a great gulf existed. The real brains of France were to be found among a small bourgeois class of bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, minor officials, lawyers, and skilled artisans, who lived in the cities and who, ambitious and discontented, did much to stimulate the increasing unrest and demand for reform which in time pervaded the whole nation. A king, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... "Bourgeois! Did you think you could bribe me with your gifts to tolerate your vileness? I have brought about your downfall and death, Dr. Bird. I, Feodrovna Androvitch! Now will I avenge my brother's death at ...
— Poisoned Air • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... Brittany, awaited in this pleasure-ground the opportunity for an audience, either at the queen's rising, or at her coming out to walk. Consequently, history has given the name of "Perchoir aux Bretons" to this piece of ground, which, in our day, is the fruit-garden of a worthy bourgeois, and forms a projection into the place des Jesuites. The latter place was included in the gardens of this beautiful royal residence, which had, as we have said, its upper and its lower gardens. Not far from the place des Jesuites ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... thoroughly enjoyed a fortnight every summer at Skegness or Sutton-on-Sea. We should have saved a little money. I should have gone to church regularly, and if possible I should have filled some minor public offices. You may call this bourgeois—it ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the fine products of the high-warp looms that had augmented the pride of their noble possessor, found their way into shops and were sold to the Swiss populace in any desired length, according to bourgeois household needs, a length for a warm bed-cover, or a square for a table; and thus disappeared so many that we are thankful for the few whole hangings of that time which are ours to inspect, and which represent the best work of the day both from Arras and from Brussels, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... provided with a cheap tablet, a well-bound blank book of two hundred pages, a small Bible Dictionary of recognized merit, and a copy of the American Revised Version of the Bible. (Standard Edition of Nelson & Sons, 1901, bourgeois 8vo, is good.) The teacher should provide for reference, to which the pupils should have constant access, a copy of the Rand-McNally Bible Atlas, by J.L. Hurlbut, D.D., a copy of Young's Complete Analytical Concordance, and a copy of a large and ...
— A Bird's-Eye View of the Bible - Second Edition • Frank Nelson Palmer
... child! When I called her Cecile, she burst into tears, and said no one had called her by that name since she had left her friend Amelie in the convent, and as to calling me Marguerite, Mademoiselle de Gringrimeau would be sure to say it was bourgeois and ill-bred to use familiar names, but then we need never let her ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... territories, it is not easy to imagine, especially if they all insisted upon independent sovereignty. There must have been some danger, surely, of their disputing with one another concerning the importance of their respective professions, like the poor bourgeois gentilhomme's dancing-master, music-master, master of morality, and master of philosophy, who all fell to blows to settle their pretensions, forgetful of the presence of their pupil. Masters, who are only expected to teach one thing, may be sincerely anxious for the improvement of their pupils ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where, amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company, a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours of dawn and "when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the grey." He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if he could. There are interminable ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... brilliant man with the discursive intellect, who carries his gift about with him, takes it out when and where he pleases, and applies it where and how he likes. Zola, when he was not using his gift, posed as an artist, a saint, or simply "a great man"; but he never contrived to be anything but a bourgeois—a "sale bourgeois," according to Cezanne. Cezanne was all gift: seen as anything but a painter he looked like a fool. At Aix he tried to pass for a respectable rentier; he found no difficulty in being silly, but he could not ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... BEAUSSIER, a bourgeois of Issoudun under the Restoration. Upon seeing Joseph Bridau in the diligence, while the artist and his mother were on a journey in 1822, he remarked that he would not care to meet him at night in the corner of a forest—he looked so much like ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... assortment they were, differing both in caste and country; as I sat on my estrade and glanced over the long range of desks, I had under my eye French, English, Belgians, Austrians, and Prussians. The majority belonged to the class bourgeois; but there were many countesses, there were the daughters of two generals and of several colonels, captains, and government EMPLOYES; these ladies sat side by side with young females destined to be demoiselles de magasins, and with some Flamandes, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... 12. R. Strauss's orchestral suite from "Der Buerger als Edelman" (opera based on Moliere's play "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme") given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Alfred de ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... the truth; here was a little bourgeois, living contentedly on next to nothing, reared in habits of penuriousness, a hidebound, mean creature, like the petty tradesmen who used to come to her whining for their bills, and whom she encountered of a Sunday ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... long before a harassed world had to reckon with bourgeois and Bolshevik, when profiteer and pacifist had not yet become words to fill the mouths of men, and not even the politicians had thought of saving the world for democracy. Yet men and women were strangely as they are now. A generation may change its manners, its ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to Hamlet in the shape of his father—duty. It is a trick of my British bourgeois blood, ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... to the Wallings. Mrs. Billy had been in on the inside of that family, and there was nothing she didn't know about it; and she brought the members up, one by one, and dissected them, and exhibited them for Montague's benefit. They were typical bourgeois people, she said. They were burghers. They had never shown the least capacity for refinement—they ate and drank, and jostled other people out of the way. The old ones had been boors, and the ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... you," he answered them. "The wealth and strength of Brittany lies in Nantes—a bourgeois city, one of the most prosperous in this realm, rendered so by the energy of the bourgeoisie and the toil of the people. It was in Nantes that this movement had its beginning, and as a result of it the King issued his order dissolving ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... whose face lit with such a gentle and gracious smile when he saw a friend approach, who endured with patience and courtesy the thousand small annoyances that every salesman knows. There were encounters with the bourgeois customer, there were the exhausting fatigues of the rush season, there were the day-long calls on the slender and none too robust frame. But through it all he kept the perfect and unassuming grace of the high-born gentleman he was. An old-fashioned courtesy and ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... coast, which may boast, not less than the village of Batz, of a splendor now lost in the night of time. The jewels, linen, cloth, ribbon, and hats are made elsewhere, but to those who buy them they are from Guerande and nowhere else. All artists, and even certain bourgeois, who come to Guerande feel, as they do at Venice, a desire (soon forgotten) to end their days amid its peace and silence, walking in fine weather along the beautiful mall which surrounds the town from gate ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... realized is the extraordinary genius for sheer "poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed. I agree that Walt Whitman's Optimism is the only kind, of that sort of thing, that one can submit to without a blush. At least it is not indecent, bourgeois, and ill-bred, like the fourth-hand Protestantism that Browning dishes up, for the delectation of Ethical Societies. It is the optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War. It is the optimism of a man who knows "the Bowery" ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Un bon bourgeois ayant appris que plusieurs de ses parents s'etaient trouves a un repas de famille auquel il n'avait pas ete invite s'ecria en colere: "Eh bien! pour les faire enrager, je vais donner un grand diner d'apparat ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... we were hailed by a soldier, who asked us for a lift as far as Tervueren. He climbed into the car beside me and rode out. The Foret de Soignes was mournful. Quatre Bras, where the cafes are usually filled with a good-sized crowd of bourgeois, was deserted and empty. The shutters were up and the proprietors evidently gone. The Minister's house, near by, was closed. The gate was locked and the gardener's dog was the only living thing in sight. We passed our Golf Club ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... names respected by the immense majority of Frenchmen (who will always be against the Government), you can crush Nathan; for although his work is far above the average, it confirms the bourgeois taste for literature without ideas. And after that, you understand, it is no longer a question of Nathan and his book, but of France and the glory of France. It is the duty of all honest and courageous pens to make strenuous opposition to these foreign importations. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... vivacity which cannot have been the common habit of her intercourse with her husband, Sieglinde pronounces judgment aloud and at once upon this ungenerous speech and speaker, whose prudence must certainly, in contrast with the Waelsung's frank magnificence of courage, seem to her unspeakably bourgeois: "Only cowards fear one going his way unarmed and alone!" And turning again eagerly to the guest: "Tell further, guest, how you lately lost your arms in battle!" Siegmund as eagerly satisfies her. The circumstances which he describes further exemplify the disposition fostered in him by his ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... I am a simple bourgeois," the King interrupted, smilingly shaking his finger. "But tell me, how can the Duke dare ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Great. She smiled and said, 'Non, Monsieur, je pensais a mon fidele domestique negre, Hassan.' He then described her house as something akin to Lansdowne House—vast rooms, splendid pictures, etc. She laughed and told him she lived in 'une maison fort modeste et tant soi peu bourgeois,' which elicited his angry exclamation that she had not faith enough, i.e. that she did ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity from that petty bourgeois atmosphere which is so often brought into your house and into your mood by the attentions of suitors, by matchmaking and marriage. I can never reconcile myself, for instance, to the expression of triumph on my wife's face every time Gnekker is in our company, nor can I reconcile myself ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance"—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?—Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... were in a panic and felt sure the end had come. So the President called a hasty meeting of his Cabinet. And such a Cabinet! I wish you could have seen them, Louis, with me in the centre playing on them like an advocate before a jury. They were the most dreadful men I ever met, bourgeois and stupid and ugly to a degree. Two of them were commission-merchants, and one of them is old Dr. Gustavanni, who kept the chemist's shop in the Piazza Royale. They were quite silly with fear, and ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... gold-coloured camlet and a skirt of gray silk trimmed with gold and silver lace. A handkerchief of priceless Genoa point half hid and half revealed her beautiful throat, and was fastened in front by a cluster of pearls, while a rope of the same, each one worth a bourgeois' income, was coiled in and out through her luxuriant hair. The lady was past her first youth, it is true, but the magnificent curves of her queenly figure, the purity of her complexion, the brightness of her deep-lashed blue eyes and the clear regularity of her features enabled her still ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ascribed to un Bourgeois de Paris,[43] whom we identify as a Cabochien clerk, had only heard Jeanne spoken of by the doctors and masters of the University of Paris. Moreover he was very ill-informed, which is regrettable. For the man stands alone in his day for energy of feeling and language, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... looked for, your Majesty. It is an army of bourgeois and craftsmen, stout fellows who could doubtless defend their walls against an attack, or might fight stoutly shoulder to shoulder, but they have an over-weening conceit in themselves, and deem that all that is necessary in war is to carry a pike ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... is so fine an arras that it gives the poet a splendor not usual to his bourgeois lays. The music runs through so many phases of emotion, and approves itself so original and exaltedly vivid in each that I put it well to the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... studio, and at the end of the day the artist must feel much as the critic does after the private view at the Royal Academy. The artist has been having a private view of the public on its good behaviour, and that wild contempt of the bourgeois which burns in every artist's breast must reach its highest temperature. However, the holidays are beginning, the working season is over, and that reflection, doubtless, helps the weary painter through his ordeal. But his friends also have to bear a good deal ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the characteristics of the life of the far west shows that, over Wisconsin and the larger part of Michigan, the Indian trade was still carried on by methods introduced by the French. [Footnote: Masson, Le Bourgeois de Nordwest; Parkman. Old Regime.] Aster's American Fur Company practically controlled the trade of Wisconsin and Michigan. It shipped its guns and ammunition, blankets, gewgaws, and whiskey from Mackinac to some one of the principal posts, where ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... unintentionally but none the less effectively, on the rich floating snobisme of Paris and of continental Europe. Those who go to the Salon for their art or invest in Henners and Bougereaus are reckoned hopelessly bourgeois even by the cultivated pressmen. It is a fastidious public, intelligent, learned, and extremely severe: painting it regards as an end in itself, not as a branch of journalism or a superior amenity; and no artist can begin to abuse his talent ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... John Moreaux. Both of them had been spectators of the martyrdom, but they have nothing of interest to say about it. And finally—(and doubtless the reader will be glad to come to the end of this interminable procession, as is the writer)—comes the deposition of John Marcel—'bourgeois' of Paris. Marcel had been in Rouen during the time of the Maid's trial, and was also present at the end of her life. M. Fabre, in concluding in his book the translation of the testimonies of the long list ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... morning thirty soldiers crept forth guided by the traitor, 'en habits de bourgeois et de chasseur,' for the house where Cartouche had lain. It was an inn, kept by one Savard, near la Haulte Borne de la Courtille; and the soldiers, though they lacked not numbers, approached the chieftain's lair shaking with terror. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... excepted—his literary existence to Balzac; Balzac, from whom all blessings, all evils, flow in the domain of the novel; Balzac, realist, idealist, symbolist, naturalist, humourist, tragedian, comedian, aristocrat, bourgeois, poet, and cleric; Balzac, truly the Shakespeare of France. The Human Comedy attracted the synthetic brain of Zola as he often tells us (see L'Oeuvre, where Sandoz, the novelist, Zola himself, explains to Claude his scheme of a ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... The bourgeois voice of Mrs. Nolak broke in upon his mellow fancies and roused him to action. He went to the phone and called up the Medill house. Miss Betty was out; had ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... siesta!" said Raoul to Ithuel, as both stood on the heel of the bowsprit, looking curiously at the scene: "sea, land, mountains, bourgeois, and mariners all dozing. Bien; there is life yonder at the west, and we must get further from votre Proserpine. Call the hands, Monsieur Lieutenant. Let us get our sweeps and put the head of le Feu-Follet the other way. Peste! the lugger ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... toilettes. For, as the reception was 'to meet the Committee of the League of all the Arts.' (Ozzie had placed many copies of the explanatory pamphlet on various tables), artists of all kinds and degrees abounded, and the bourgeois world (which chiefly owned the automobiles) thought proper to be sartorially as improper as fashion would allow; and fashion allowed quite a lot. The affair might have been described as a study in shoulder-blades. It was a very great show, and Mr. Prohack appreciated ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... apprentices was the constant object of reproof. The boy was accused of negligence, wasting his time, of spending three hours over a task which might have been done in less than one. When Derues had convinced the father, a Parisian bourgeois, that his son was a bad boy and a good-for-nothing, he came to this man one day in a state of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... She was too far away for Max to speak, even if he had dared; but a moment later a big man who squeezed himself in between table and revolving chair, next to the girl, made an excuse to ask for the salt, and begin a conversation. He did this in a matter-of-fact, bourgeois way, however, which not even a prude or a snob could think offensive. And apparently the girl was far from being a prude or a snob. She answered with a soft, girlish charm of manner which gave the impression that she was generously ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... scared and dazed enough very likely, she once more attracted the attention of the little girl who had been kneeling near her in the church, and who now pointed her out to her parents, good, substantial-looking bourgeois. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... flowers that had fallen on the carpet. "You ought," he said to his wife, "to study Madame de Vandenesse. I'd like to see you before the world as insolent and overbearing as your sister has just been here. You have a silly, bourgeois air ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... rights? Why the rights that the bourgeois should not feast continually, and that the labouring proletariat might reap the rewards ...
— The Cause of it All • Leo Tolstoy
... to the quay by way of the Rue de la Monnaie; there he found groups of bourgeois clad in black cloaks or gray, according as they belonged to the upper or lower bourgeoisie. They were standing motionless, while single men passed from one group to another. All these cloaks, gray or black, were raised behind by the point of a sword, or before by the barrel ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... this exclusive little set include two or three ecclesiastics, admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their wit; for these great nobles find their own society rather dull, and introduce the bourgeois element into their drawing-rooms, as a baker puts leaven into ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... most part no more established or seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated pretensions merely), and fatally despoiled of the fine old ecclesiastical arrogance, ... The field of American life is as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece; ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... difficulties of a colonial life, the religious teachers always threw a gleam of light amid the mental darkness that necessarily prevailed among the toilers of the land and sea. Bishops Laval, Lartigue, Strachan, and Mountain; Sister Bourgeois, Dr. Burns, Dr. Jas. McGregor, Dr. Anson Green, are conspicuous names among the many religious teachers who did good service in the early times of colonial development. During the first periods of Canadian history, the priest or clergyman was, as often as not, a ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... not likely that Rodrigo's mistress possessed a library, for private collections of books were at that time exceedingly rare in bourgeois houses. A short time after this they were first made possible in Rome by the invention of printing, which was ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... were not eccentric have become rare, and genius, so far as it is a style of hairdressing, and originality, so far as it is a matter of etiquette or morals, have become the habitual garments of the commonplace. The introduction of the word 'bourgeois' as a comminatory epithet into the English language, by bourgeois writers writing for the bourgeois, will remain a memorial for ever, for the philological humourist to chuckle over. If good resolutions could change the ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... trait of this literature is found in its democratic spirit. Most of the heroes are not titled personages; they are peasants, bourgeois, petty officials, students, and, finally, "intellectuals." This democratic taste is explained by the very ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... like to say a few words about a much humbler, a much simpler, a much more familiar subject. It awakes no classical remembrances of Leonidas or Marathon. My heroes risk their lives, but they are not soldiers, merely prosaic "bourgeois" and workmen. They have no weapon, they cannot fight. They have only to remain cheery in adversity and patient in the face of taunts. They cannot render blow for blow, they have no sword to flourish against an insolent conqueror. They can only oppose a stout heart, a loyal spirit, and an ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... moan again several times. They took him out of his grave, and he was attended by doctors and surgeons. The physician maintained, after he had been opened, that the young man had not been dead two hours. This is extracted from the manuscript of a bourgeois of Metz, who ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... 25th. 1909, and, much more fully than elsewhere in John M. Synge, by M. Maurice Bourgeois, the French authority on Synge, whose book is the best extant record of the man's career. A good many critical and controversial books and articles of varying power and bitterness have appeared about him. ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... and liberal element (with a tinge of the "red") in the school of the '40's, and Gontcharoff stood for the bourgeois and opportunist ideals of the St. Petersburg bureaucrats, Count Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy penetrated more profoundly into the depths of the spirit of the times than any other writer of the period in the matter of analysis and skepticism which ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of peasant origin, implored his son:—"Mike, don't get out of your class. Be a peasant until you die, do not become a nobleman, nor a merchant, nor a bourgeois. If, as you say, the Zemstvo officer now has the right to inflict corporal punishment on peasants, then let him also have the right to punish you." He was proud of his peasant origin, he ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... service of the North-West Company that Alexander Mackenzie made his famous journey. He had arrived in Canada in 1779. After five years spent in the counting-house of a trading company at Montreal, he had been assigned for a year to a post at Detroit, and in 1785 had been elevated to the dignity of a bourgeois or partner in the North-West Company. In this capacity Alexander Mackenzie was sent out to the Athabaska district to take control, in that vast and scarcely known region, of the posts of the traders now united into the ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... that Lord Theign sustained—as to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. "She has her friends by the score—at this time of day." There was clearly a claim here also—to know the time of day. "But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your own—of ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... other hand French women seem to have done better than English women in the conduct of their private affairs. This, I think, is true both of the bourgeois and peasant classes. In England the earning power on which the house depends is the man's. When he is taken away he is very badly missed and the home suffers or even collapses. In France the women are more independent economically. They can carry on the business or ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... boards, and charmed the town as an actor. Another pupil of De Loutherbourg, and a close imitator of his worst manner, who is yet worthy of public notice as the founder of the Dulwich Gallery, was Francis Bourgeois, knighted by the King of Poland. Edward Dayes, artist, critic, and biographer of artists, is said to have exclaimed eccentrically in reference to Sir Francis: 'Dietricy begat Casanova, Casanova begat De Loutherbourg, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... of highly cultivated fathers and mothers as of simple bourgeois or peasant parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of the first class, the latter torment their children in a naive way, while the former are infinitely wise and methodical in their stupidity. Rarely is a mother of the upper class one of those artists of home life who through the ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... try now to arouse the middle classes. Let one legion of National Guards go out in arms, and the Elysee was lost. For this a decisive blow must be struck—the heart of the middle classes must be reached—the "bourgeois" must be inspired by a grand spectacle which should ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... found out its true field. And yet it was in the middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which it was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetiere in the preface to his "Roman Bourgeois." Furetiere lacked the skill and the insight needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard he set up—indeed, the attainment of that standard is beyond the power of most novelists even now. But Furetiere's declaration of the principles which he proposed to follow is as significant now ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... "Un bourgeois estant interrouge par ledict evesque de Londres se souffriroit bien le feug, respondist qu'il en fist l'experience: et aiant fait apporter une chandelle allumee, il meit la main dessus sans la retirer ny se mouvoir."—Renard to Charles V.: Granvelle Papers, vol. vi. p. 404. The man's name was ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... Monsieur Jourdain, bourgeois. Madame Jourdain, his wife. Lucile, their daughter. Nicole, maid. Cleonte, suitor of Lucile. Covielle, Cleonte's valet. Dorante, Count, suitor of Dorimene. Dorimene, Marchioness. Music Master. Pupil of the ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... the King. "Ah, damn it, no. A king is not bourgeois, what you call citizen. That is the point. It is because I am a king that the Emperor interferes. If I were ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... and university to sanction us in our wilfulness of savagery. What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding, and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois philosophers, nor behind the skirts of subsidized preachers, professors, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... (1862- ), French statesman, was born at Nantes, of a bourgeois family. He studied law, and while still young took to politics, associating himself with the most advanced movements, writing articles for the anarchist journal Le Peuple, and directing the Lanterne for some time. From this ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... prisoner of this Louis XIV camlet, and he was now going to be executed. A beautiful affair, truly, brilliant and able! All this had been used only by the poor Auvergnats, without Saniel enjoying it at all, for he had neither the bourgeois taste for ornaments nor the desire for elegance. A movement of anger and revolt against himself made him strike his desk with his fist. What a ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... see it,' replied Holt. 'The Indians call him "the forest man," and the Lower Canadians the "bourgeois;" they attribute to him a sagacity almost human; the Crees and Ojibbeways fancy him an enchanted being, and will enter into conversation with him when they ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the salesman. "But I think you have a very unusual child here. He will go much farther than you may think. Why? Because he is sensitive and has an imagination that only needs the proper guidance. Too many children become mere bourgeois ciphers with paunches and round 'O' minds full of tripe. They'll stay on earth. That is, I mean they'll be stuck ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this—that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and that ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... the first of next April, when I shall return home to take Ma to Ky . . . . If I want to, I can get subbing every night of the week. I go to work at seven in the evening and work till three the next morning. . . . The type is mostly agate and minion, with some bourgeois, and when one gets a good agate 'take,' he is sure to make money. I ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... The "Bourgeois Gentilhomme" ("Shopkeeper turned Gentleman") partakes of the nature of the farce quite as much as it does of the comedy. But it is farce such as only a man of genius could produce. In it Moliere ridicules the airs and affectations of a rich man vulgarly ambitious to figure in a social rank too ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... into art. Against these high conceptions, and the overstrained sentiment connected with them, the positive intellect and the mocking temper of France reacted; a literature of satire arose. By degrees the bourgeois spirit encroached upon and overpowered the chivalric ideals. At length the mediaeval conceptions were exhausted. Literature dwindled as its sources were impoverished; ingenuities and technical formalities replaced imagination. The minds of men were prepared to accept the new influences ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... where we left a people flourishing Singing in the sunshine for the fun of being free, Now they burden man and maid With a law the priests have laid, And the bourgeois blow their noses by a ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... carefully replaced in the basket, when the commissionaire went out again, on her errands, honorably disposed to be useful. Still she did not deem it necessary to conceal her employer's poverty, which was soon divulged to the porteress, and by her to the bourgeois. ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... adopting the bourgeois mode of travelling, set forth from the Tower Stairs, on a lovely morning at the close of August 1840. Fifty years ago, the idea of a general, an ambassador, and a peer, with his marchioness and suite, embarking on board the common conveyance of the common race of mankind, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Republican chieftains. The Republicans were disappointed, and disliked the vigor of the government, which gave indications of a sterner rule than that of Charles X. Moreover, the laboring classes found themselves unemployed. The government of Louis Philippe was not for them, but for the bourgeois party, shop-keepers, bankers, and merchants. The funeral of General Lamarque, a popular favorite, was made the occasion of fresh disturbances, which at one time were quite serious. The old cry of Vive la Republique began to be heard ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I would willingly reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more pernicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) implements, the umbrella ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... [Footnote: When I first came to Leicester the birds, mounted on stands and perches 9 ft. from the floor, were labelled by slips of yellow paper pasted on the stands, the type being that known as Pica and Bourgeois!] ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... romance was on every one's lips, and I recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality—that of the improper Mr. Robinson, I mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois, could possibly have dwelt. It was to be true indeed that Walt Whitman achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however, but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and getting out of ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Herr von Bourgeois, with a sigh, "your majesty has no further use for us, and we return ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... creed that the progress of man depends upon his mastery of Nature, and that for acquiring that mastery science is his only weapon. Again, it is absurd to accuse us of indifference to ethics. Our standards, indeed, may not be the same as those of bourgeois society; if they were, that would be their condemnation; for a new economic regime necessarily postulates a new ethic. But every regime requires and produces its appropriate standards; and the socialist regime will be no exception. Our feeling upon ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, in the year 1828, while crossing the mountains with a pack train, was over-taken by a snow storm, in which he lost most of his animals, including a noted bob-tailed race-horse. His Canadian followers, in compliment to their chief, or "bourgeois," named the place the Pass of the Siskiyou,—an appellation subsequently adopted as the veritable Indian name of the locality, and which thence extended to the whole range, and the ...
— Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, or, Trade Language of Oregon • George Gibbs
... Senator, "that the second, fourth, and sixth books of his AEneid are excellent, but as for his pious AEneas, his strong Cloanthus, his friend Achates, his little Ascanius, his silly King Latinus, his bourgeois Amata, his insipid Lavinia, I think there can be nothing more flat and disagreeable. I prefer Tasso a good deal, or even the ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... Honour, who used to enter, walk with great dignity to his table, eat sparingly of one or two dishes, drink a glass of his vin ordinaire and retire. Sometimes he was accompanied by a tiny spaniel, which occupied a chair beside him; and frequently a middle-aged son, whose bourgeois appearance was in amazing contrast to that of his refined old father, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... urged him to let him give him as good a meal as Mouqin could provide, with a certain vintage of French wine which he knew Shelby was fond of. There were cocktails to begin with, though Shelby had intimated more than once that he abominated the bourgeois American habit of indulging in such poison. And there was an onion soup au gratin, a casserole, and artichokes, and special coffee, and I ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... my hands in their muck, to settle down and live my life according to their bourgeois standards, to have grossness of soft flesh replace able sinews, to submerge mentality in favor of a specious craftiness of mind which passes in the "city" for brains—well, I'm on the road. And, oh, girl, girl, I ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... as its framework precisely honor. Honor is not a bourgeois ideal, but an aristocratic ideal. It was slowly created by the flower of humanity throughout the centuries. When force becomes educated, force opposes itself. It limits and incloses itself. It becomes intelligent and tempered by reserve and by tact. Brutal force thus changes ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... fire, which had burned with so fierce a blaze at times, smouldered for long years, until in the beginning of the fourteenth century the flames burst forth anew. At that time a company of poets, and they were of bourgeois origin and not of the nobility, determined to take vigorous measures to restore the art of the troubadour to its former high position, and to this end they founded the College du Gay Scavoir, which was to support and maintain annually in Toulouse a poetic ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Prince, September 19, 1356, aroused great indignation among the common people of France, with scorn of the nobility; for these leaders, with an army of sixty thousand, had fled before an enemy whom they outnumbered seven to one. In the next assembly of the states-general the bourgeois obtained a preponderance so intolerable to the nobles that they withdrew to their homes. A little later the deputies of the clergy also retired, leaving only the representatives of the cities—among whom the supremacy of the members from Paris was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... through the petrified formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness. How many have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... may for the first time know what true life is, and what are its ineffable privileges. Yet it is not on this ground that acceptance can be hoped for the conception of immortality here crudely and vaguely presented ill contrast to that bourgeois eternity of individualism and the family affections, which is probably the great charm of Spiritualism to the majority of its proselytes. It is doubtful whether the things that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," have ever taken stronghold of the imagination, or reconciled it to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... house, Joseph Lebas used to advert with horror to the story of his sister-in-law Augustine, who married the artist Sommervieux. Astronomers lived on spiders. These bright examples of the attitude of the bourgeois mind toward philology, the drama, politics, and science will throw light upon its breadth of view and powers ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... to these Indians. The second horse was a very plain one, a bay, of the kind known as "cot." He was a modest, sober animal, with nothing either of the hunter or warrior in his looks; but sleek withal, and in good condition, like a well-fed citizen. Hence his name, which was "Le Bourgeois." Of course he was ridden by the quiet Lucien. The third horse might have been termed a pony—if size be considered—as he was by far the smallest of the three. He was a horse, however, both in shape and character—one of that small but fiery breed taken ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... never felt the guilty caress of cold-cream or powder, and if it was mahogany in tint and deeply wrinkled, it was at least as respectable as her past. In her day that now bourgeois adjective—twin to genteel—had been synchronous with the equally obsolete word swell, but it had never occurred to even the more modern Mrs. Abbott and her select inner circle of friends, dwelling on family estates in the San Mateo valley, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... parrot back on his perch, where he swayed from side to side, squawking in protest: "Les bourgeois a la ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... Romance of Scarron and the "Bourgeois" Romance of Furetiere[257] is one of the most curious among the minor phenomena of literary history; but it repeats itself in that history so often that it becomes, by accumulation, hardly minor. There is a vast difference between Furetiere and Miss Austen, and a still vaster one ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... large boots, have rapiers at their side which they are very ready to draw, are great trenchermen, mighty fine drinkers, and somewhat gallant in their conduct to the sex. There is also a citizen or two from Furetiere's "Roman Bourgeois," there is Manon, aforesaid, and a company of picaroons, and an archbishop, and a lady styled Marianne, and a newly ennobled Count of mysterious wealth, and two grisettes, named Mimi and Musette, with their student-lovers. M. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... only risen about an hour before; the heat would soon become oppressive, and the sybaritic beetle, without attending to his morning appetite, which his fresh meal could not fail to excite, nourishes the bourgeois dream of making his little pile in order to enjoy himself sheltered from the hot rays. Immediately on arriving on the scene of the accident each began to display feverish activity. All set to work. With their heads, the anterior edge of which is flat and supplied with six strong ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... the novice must, indeed, unless he be exceptionally gifted, "pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than talent—character. Or if he be of a mind so independent ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... suspect, they said, a foolish girl? But our enemies were very clever, and soon the hunt was cried against me. They tried to rob me of them, but they failed, for I too had become clever. Then they asked for the help of the law—first in Italy and then in France. Ah, it was subtly done. Respectable bourgeois, who hated the Bolsheviki but had bought long ago the bonds of my country, desired to be repaid their debts out of the property of the Russian crown which might be found in the West. But behind them ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... by the essentially aristocratic swing of his wattles and the symmetrical curves of his graceful lobes; and the proud pomposity of his tail feathers irresistibly called to mind the old nobility and the Court of LOUIS QUATORZE. Pimple, our tabby kitten, looked indescribably bourgeois ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... public ends, and seems to have delighted in the construction of family feeling formed in his son-in-law's mind by homely sentiment. It is preposterous to suppose that Napoleon really entertained such a view of his marriage as that of the Parisian bourgeois; but viewing himself as an established dynastic ruler, he could well imagine that when Austria had her choice between two purely dynastic alliances, she would, for the sake of Maria Louisa, have chosen that with France. This rather simple conception he seems ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... passengers, railroad officials; the red kepis of soldiers dotted the crowd; a priest or two in shovel hat and buckled shoes, a Sister of Charity from the Rue de Bac lent graver accents to the throng; and everywhere were the pretty bourgeois women of the capital gathered to welcome relatives or friends, or themselves starting on some brief summer voyage so dear to those who seldom find it in their hearts to leave Paris for longer than ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... said; "though I should not have gone had I not thought that more would come of it. What have we done? Captured two knights and killed two bourgeois! Pooh, it did not need five thousand men ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... the form,'"—phrases and statements like these meet us everywhere in current criticism of literature and the other arts. They are the stock-in-trade of writers who understand of them little more than the fact that somehow or other they are not "bourgeois." But we find them also seriously used by writers whom we must respect, whether they are anonymous or not; something like one or another of them might be quoted, for example, from Professor Saintsbury, the late R.A.M. Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are the watchwords of a school ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... knew how to reply to such a question. He recalled with antipathy his bourgeois existence over there in Barcelona, before buying the steamer. He was a man of action and could live only when occupied ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... were now slipping by. Some of the poorest folk of the environs of Paris were at last coming into the city, bringing their chattels with them. Strange ideas, however, had taken hold of some of the more simple-minded suburban bourgeois. Departing hastily into the provinces, so as to place their skins out of harm's reach, they had not troubled to store their household goods in the city; but had left them in their coquettish villas and pavilions, the doors of which were barely ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... classes mix well with strangers; not so the medio ceto who, under a constitutional regime, rule the roast. Men with small fixed incomes have little to thank us for; we make things dear, and we benefit only the working men. Bourgeois exactions have driven both French ships and American whalers to Tenerife; and many of them would do the same with the English and German residents and visitors of Funchal. Not a few have noble and historic names, whose owners ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... aware that the pillage and excess at the Hotel de La Poste inspired in every bourgeois fear for his family and his house, which motivated them to expel the Cossacks as much as the death of Curtois, and that they would have acted very differently if, instead of robbers and assassins, it had been regular troops who had entered the town. Nonetheless ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... by the French to be fire-ships, created a further panic among them. The captain and crew of the Tourville, believing that the fire-vessel was bearing down upon them, deserted their ship, and hastened in their boats on shore. A gallant French quartermaster, however, of the name of Bourgeois, managed to get on board again before the boat shoved off, resolved to stand by his ship to the last. To secure his safety should the fire-ships grapple the Tourville, he at once began constructing a raft. He had just completed it when an English boat approached, ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... before, was now clear white and red: there were no more political allusions in his hair, which was, on the contrary, neatly frizzed, and brushed over the forehead, shell-shape. This head-dress, joined to a thin pair of whiskers, cut crescent-wise from the ear to the nose, gave my friend a regular bourgeois physiognomy, wax-doll-like: he looked a great deal too well; and, added to this, the solemnity of his prefectural costume, gave his whole appearance a pompous well-fed look that by no ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and dramatic pen, a penetration as searching as a probe, and a power of psychological vision that in its minute detail, now pathetic, now ironical, in its merciless revelation of the hidden springs of the human heart, whether of aristocrat, bourgeois, peasant, or priest, allow one to call him a Meissonier ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... went on talking volubly. She was evidently both fond and proud of her master. Suddenly she waved her lean arm towards a large, ambitious painting showing a typical family group of French bourgeois ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... himself a decadent, the artist must take as many pains as fall to the prosiest bourgeois. This is the paradox of the position. Just as the pyrrhonist in maintaining that there is no truth asserts one, so the literary pessimist partly contradicts his contention of the futility of existence by his anxiety to express himself elegantly. Leopardi's Italian and Schopenhauer's ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Merimee and About, were imperialists: now they are all dead or have changed their politics. During this period, too, the intelligent and literary opposition was mostly Orleanistic, but the last seven years have clearly shown not only that the bourgeois monarchy had no roots in the heart of the people, but also that the conservative Republic possesses all its advantages, combined with few of its objectionable qualities. To men like Renan and Laugel, who have been Orleanists all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... have no awe of royalty perceive that the luckless King was simply a square peg in a round hole. He loved locksmithy, hunting, and home; would have been a successful inventor, pioneer, or bourgeois parent. In the chair of State, on this day of petitions, his head and hand busied themselves with a wonderful new doorlock he ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... This delightful novelette, the queer title of which is nearly equivalent to 'At the Sign of the Cat and the Racket,' showed in its treatment of the heroine's unhappy passion the intuition and penetration of the born psychologist, and in its admirable description of bourgeois life the pictorial genius of the genuine realist. In other words the youthful romancer was merged once for all in the matured novelist. The years of waiting and observation had done their work, and along the streets of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... what it almost amounts to now in Germany, and it is for this reason, no less than to escape military service, that so many millions of Germans have immigrated to this country. Unlike the vast majority of the bourgeois and lower classes, a kindly but stupid people, they were born with an alertness of mind and an energy of character which gave them the impetus to transfer themselves to a land where life might be harder but where soul and body could ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... and that his criticism is adequate seems to me equally obvious. But the former contingency—the gross misapprehension of the public, even the wiser public—has been astounding. He has been read in a narrow, literal, bourgeois spirit. The personal pronoun, which he uses so freely, has been taken to stand for the private individual Walt Whitman, so that he has been looked upon as a compound of egotism and licentiousness. His character has been traduced, and his purpose ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... advantage. Certain people make a man's acquaintance, and pay him flattering attentions, not because their hearts are good and they wish to give him pleasure, but because there is some percentage of advantage to be gained by knowing him. That is to be bourgeois in the vulgar sense, if you like! And that is the trade-mark stamped upon most of us—selfishness! snobbishness! One sees it in the conventional society manners, which are superficially veneered, fundamentally bad; the outcome of self-interest, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... speak. I opened my mouth and closed it again. Never in my life before had I asked any one for food. My embarrassment was painful, extreme. I was ashamed. I, who looked upon begging as a delightful whimsicality, thumbed myself over into a true son of Mrs. Grundy, burdened with all her bourgeois morality. Only the harsh pangs of the belly-need could compel me to do so degraded and ignoble a thing as beg for food. And into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and ingenuous youth unused ...
— The Road • Jack London
... French confreres, (whom I have mentioned as "nondescripts," from the circumstance of their being under no regular engagement with the Company,) playing cards or fiddling and dancing. We were on one occasion engaged in the latter amusement en pleine midi—our Deputy Bourgeois being one of the party, and all of us in the highest possible glee, when lo! in the midst of our hilarity, the hall door flew open and the great man stood sternly before us. The hand-writing on the wall ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... have been beneath him. To accept their laws as binding on one's own conscience was, using the common expression, to give oneself away, to confess oneself commonplace. Every decent instinct a man might own to was proof in Vane's eyes of his being "suburban," "bourgeois"—everything that was unintellectual. It was the first time I had heard this sort of talk. Vane was one of the pioneers of the movement, which has since become somewhat tiresome. To laugh at it is easy to a man of the world; boys are impressed by it. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome |
