#big thief little thief
“Agnes belongs to Old New York, which she is fond of explaining to Marian. Meaning of course, what Ward McAllister called The Four Hundred. The families and members fashionable New York society, made up often of the descendents of the original Dutch and English settlers. The irony of referring to these people as aristocracy lies in the fact that they were not noble at all. They were merchants and farmers and the castaway sons from larger, greater families who came to this country and made their fortunes in the commerce of their time: trade, wool, land, etc. And with their acquired wealth, they bought themselves influence and power, but their greatest claim to nobility was simply that that they had been rich for long enough that people kind of forgot that they’d once been scraggly Dutch farmers.”— Brandon Taylor
Okay but that applies to all kinds of nobility, always, everywhere. Go far enough back in time, and inevitably there’s an ancestor who acquired property and status he didn’t previously have (typically by committing some horrific act of violence), and then bequeathed it to the next generation. It ain’t New York specific. No one’s ancestors were “noble” since the beginning of time. Someone was simply an especially successful thief / plunderer / exploiter.
