"At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone"
About this Quote
Love, in La Bruyere's hands, isn’t a candlelit inevitability; it’s a social performance with awkward stage directions. The line lands because it treats romance not as a steady flame but as a choreography that depends on momentum, witnesses, and scripts. At the start, being alone means the protective noise of society falls away. Flirtation can hide behind conversation, etiquette, and plausible deniability; solitude demands intent. The embarrassment is the body catching up to what the mind has been playacting: now you have to mean it.
At the end, the same solitude becomes an indictment. When love has thinned into habit or obligation, private space no longer feels like intimacy; it feels like exposure. The embarrassment shifts from desire to recognition: there’s nothing left to perform, no audience to impress, no story to tell yourselves. Two people who once used privacy as a promise now experience it as a void.
La Bruyere, a moralist of Louis XIV's court, is allergic to sentimental self-mythology. He’s writing from a world where relationships are entangled with rank, reputation, and ritual, where "alone" is rarely neutral. The quote’s cynicism is surgical: love begins and ends in the same discomfort because it’s never purely internal. It needs social scaffolding to start, and it collapses when that scaffolding can’t disguise the gap between two individuals sitting together, out of lines to deliver.
At the end, the same solitude becomes an indictment. When love has thinned into habit or obligation, private space no longer feels like intimacy; it feels like exposure. The embarrassment shifts from desire to recognition: there’s nothing left to perform, no audience to impress, no story to tell yourselves. Two people who once used privacy as a promise now experience it as a void.
La Bruyere, a moralist of Louis XIV's court, is allergic to sentimental self-mythology. He’s writing from a world where relationships are entangled with rank, reputation, and ritual, where "alone" is rarely neutral. The quote’s cynicism is surgical: love begins and ends in the same discomfort because it’s never purely internal. It needs social scaffolding to start, and it collapses when that scaffolding can’t disguise the gap between two individuals sitting together, out of lines to deliver.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688). French wording commonly given: "Au commencement et à la fin de l'amour, les deux amants sont embarrassés de se trouver seuls." |
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