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There was also Females for Felons, which sought to provide “sexual gratification” for inmates deprived of carnal pleasures; Omar’s School for Beggars, which taught the nouveau pauvre where and how to panhandle; and Euthanasia Cruises, a Florida cruise line created in the age of Jack Kevorkian “for people who wanted to expire in luxury,” as his website put it.

My lapse in standing was the misfortune of being from the nouveau pauvre side of what passed for an elegant family there in the Pittsburgh of the South.

Though Mr. Truax didn’t “believe in” women salesmen, one woman briskly overrode his beliefs: Miss Beatrice Joline, of the Gramercy Park Jolines, who cheerfully called herself “one of the nouveau pauvre,” and condescended to mere Upper West Side millionaires, and had to earn her frocks and tea money.

He sees the shabby condition into which imperial palaces and State houses are falling, and talks with the aristocratic or cultured nouveau pauvre carrying his lunch of sausage and black bread to a gloomy apartment at the back of a fourth floor, and he feels the calamity that has fallen upon Austria.