Cooks’ Caps and Coronets.
True Stories of Members of the European Nobility Who Were Domestic Servants Before or After Fortune Smiled Upon Them—Several Society Leaders Came from the Kitchen.
Extremes often meet, and probably nothing better illustrates this than the many instances that exist of the elevation of persons of lowly birth to positions of great dignity and importance, while many others who have been delicately nurtured and enjoyed the highest culture have been forced to resort to the humblest forms of hard labor in order to earn the bread which they would eat.
Wicked little Cupid is responsible for many of the former cases, for he dearly loves a joke, and frequently has it at the expense of the rank and traditional glory of some ancient house and name. The world has always been rather democratic when love has stepped in, and some of the great personages of history have contracted alliances which might have been expected to turn things topsy-turvy, yet nothing has been seriously ruffled.
In Paris one of the most influential and popular leaders of society is the Baroness de Waru, the wife of the only son and heir of the multimillionaire president of the Orleans Railroad Company. Her blonde beauty is of the most ethereal kind, and her dainty person is distinguished by so much aristocratic elegance that no one to look at her would ever dream that her father had begun his career as a mere stable-boy, who, in the service of the last reigning Duke of Parma, was promoted from one post to another until he blossomed forth as a general, a baron, and as Prime Minister of the Duchy of Parma, besides being decorated with the grand crosses of most of the orders of chivalry of Europe.