Life & Wisdom Quote by Adelbert von Chamisso

A “bargain” disguised as courtship is the sentence’s first little knife twist. Chamisso frames marriage not as romance but as transaction, and he does it with a cool, legalistic diction that makes the emotional stakes feel even more ruthless. “All possible means” suggests an exhausting arsenal of persuasion - flattery, pressure, staged encounters, social theater - the whole bourgeois machinery deployed to convert a daughter’s future into a settled deal. The parents aren’t merely eager; they’re “infatuated,” a deliberately skewed adjective that transfers irrational passion from young lovers to the older generation. Their desire isn’t love but acquisition: status, security, a favorable match, a story that will read well in a drawing room.

Then comes the pivot: “deception put an end to these usual artifices.” The line is almost smug in its efficiency. The parents’ “artifices” are already manipulations, but deception arrives as a higher-order trick that ends the need for further performance. Subtext: when a society normalizes soft coercion, the boundary between acceptable matchmaking and outright fraud gets thin fast. The moral problem isn’t that deception intrudes on an otherwise honest ritual; it’s that deception is the logical endpoint of a system built on managing appearances.

Chamisso, writing in a Europe obsessed with propriety and social climbing, uses clipped phrasing to mimic the way institutions sanitize harm. The sentence reads like a report, which is the point: the ugliest human maneuvers become “usual” once everyone agrees to call them custom.