Love Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert is warning that contempt is never a private indulgence; it changes the chemistry between people. “Disparaging” sounds casual, almost conversational, but he treats it like a solvent: once you start scoring points off someone you love, you’re also etching away the intimacy that made them lovable to you in the first place. The line isn’t sentimental, it’s clinical. Alienation is presented as an effect, not a moral failing.

The second sentence sharpens into metaphor and quietly implicates the reader. “Idols” suggests devotion, but also projection: we don’t love people raw, we love our edited versions of them. “We must not touch” isn’t prudishness; it’s a recognition that contact means reality, and reality means wear. The brilliance is in the tactile image of “gilt” coming off “in our hands.” Gilt is already a fake gold, a surface treatment, so the disappointment is partly self-incriminating. Your hands did it. Your need to test, to correct, to puncture the fantasy produces the very tarnish you’ll later complain about.

In Flaubert’s world (and in his fiction, from Madame Bovary onward), romantic idealization is both irresistible and destructive. He’s writing out of a 19th-century realism that prides itself on disillusionment, yet he’s skeptical of the realist’s smug pleasure in debunking. There’s a cynic’s sting here: the act of “seeing clearly” can be less truth than compulsion, and the price of that clarity is distance.