Love & Passion Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac doesn’t romanticize adultery so much as anatomize the social machinery that makes it feel romantic. The line turns on a clean, nasty inversion: the lover performs self-erasure, the husband performs self-regard. It’s witty because it pretends to be a simple rule of human nature while smuggling in a critique of a whole institution. “Always” and “runs the other way” are the tell: Balzac is speaking in absolutes to expose the roles society hands men, not to offer a tender observation about devotion.

The subtext is that marriage, in Balzac’s France, is less a love story than a contract, a merger, a public arrangement with private consequences. The husband’s priority—“himself first”—isn’t merely ego; it’s sanctioned entitlement. He owns the household’s respectability, the money, often the wife’s mobility. The lover, by contrast, is precarious. His devotion has to be conspicuous because it’s his only currency. He can’t offer legitimacy, so he offers attention. The mistress becomes “first” because she’s the entire point of the affair; the lover’s identity is built around her.

Context matters: Balzac wrote in a post-Revolutionary, Restoration-era culture where bourgeois marriage stabilized property and status, and where romantic passion was increasingly idealized in literature even as it was disciplined in real life. The joke lands because it’s too close to the truth of the period: marriage turns desire into duty, and duty makes selfishness look like responsibility. The lover’s “selflessness” is also self-serving—an addictive form of vanity—while the husband’s selfishness is just what the system calls normal.