A man whose father crawled up from nothing at all by intrigue, and whose mother--God knows whom she wasn't mixed up with....

No, excuse me, but I consider myself aristocratic, and people like me, who can point back in the past to three or four honorable generations of their family, of the highest degree of breeding (talent and intellect, of course that's another matter), and have never curried favor with anyone, never depended on anyone for anything, like my father and my grandfather.

And I know many such.