Word: ormolu
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...drinks Perrier with lime and practices sneering at all the encroaching riffraff that are really its own terrors of inadequacy. Snobbery is a grasping after little dignities, little validations and reassurances. It is a way of swanking up the self, of giving it some swag and flounce and ormolu. It is a way of asserting what one is not (not like them), what one is better than...
...three years ago, the Shusters are definitely B.C., and so, of course, are their guests. They are a vanishing breed, living life slowly in a town that wants to move at top speed, watching with dismay as old landmarks give way to new parking lots and glitzy, glass-and-ormolu gaming houses...
Once, when lunching with young Winston Churchill in 1895, the Chancellor of the Exchequer fashioned a wonderfully weary ormolu dictum: "My dear Winston, the experiences of a long life have convinced me that nothing ever happens." Churchill, of course, spent a lifetime of 90 years learning that practically everything happens, especially, from time to time, the unthinkable...
...double loss of Dujarier and Bavaria. But at 35, after severe bouts of sickness and marriage, she rallied enough to join the California gold rush. She opened a frontier salon in a mining camp called Grass Valley and stocked it with Ludwig's jewels, Louis Seize cabinets, ormolu mirrors, Kanaka houseboys, a swan bed, a pet bear and every Senator, Governor or millionaire she could find. In the back of her mind, as letters discovered after her death made clear, was a plot to capture California from the U.S. and set herself up as Queen of Lolaland...
...Clignancourt and onto the plain of Saint-Ouen, where the army occasionally held maneuvers. Here the evicted peddlers settled down, offered their trinkets for sale to passersby. When the army seemed not to object, they put up awnings over their merchandise, built flimsy wooden booths. They sold everything from ormolu clocks to cracked washbasins, and one of their most popular items was a cheap, "hard" mattress, usually filled with fleas. Thus, back in the 1890s, the famed Paris Flea Market began...