Marriage Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac doesn’t just compare women to flowers; he compares their social value to damage. In two quick images - “plucked” and “walked over” - he turns marriage and adultery into visible, irreversible bruises, as if female sexuality were a fragile surface that records every touch. The rhetoric is bluntly economic: a “young bride” is prized precisely because she’s newly taken, removed from the wild and claimed. Even that first state isn’t freedom, it’s extraction. She’s beautiful because she’s been cut.

Then the second metaphor lands with a nastier moral geometry. A “guilty wife” isn’t merely withered; she’s been trampled. The verb “walked over” smuggles in public humiliation and social contempt - not just private “sin,” but a kind of communal footprint. It also implies repetition: walked over by more than one passerby, more than one act. Guilt here isn’t an interior conscience so much as a stain the world agrees to see.

Context matters: Balzac’s Comedie humaine is obsessed with how bourgeois respectability polices desire, especially women’s. The line reads less like a timeless observation than a calibrated flash of 19th-century patriarchy doing what it does best: making male possession sound like natural beauty, and female transgression sound like physical ruin. Men’s appetites are absent from the frame; women’s bodies carry the narrative consequences.

The intent is both descriptive and disciplinary. It flatters the era’s moral order by aestheticizing it, turning surveillance into poetry - a neat trick, and an ugly one.