"Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing"
About this Quote
Balzac drops “sovereign deity” like a stone into the parlor: a blasphemous little coronation that makes biology sound like politics and fate sound like bad governance. In a culture that wrapped reproduction in piety, lineage, and moral bookkeeping, he strips the whole enterprise down to its most humiliating administrator: accident. Not Providence. Not virtue. Not medical expertise. Chance.
The line works because it’s both intimate and ruthless. “My dear” carries the conversational softness of a salon aside, the tone of someone offering reassurance. Then the reassurance curdles: you are not in charge. The aristocratic diction (“sovereign,” “deity”) doesn’t elevate childbirth; it mocks the human need to narrate it as meaningful and controllable. Balzac’s France was obsessed with inheritance, legitimacy, and social continuity, yet the raw mechanics of conception remain laughably indifferent to those anxieties. The phrase is a miniature realist manifesto: society’s elaborate systems of status and propriety rest on a biological roulette wheel.
Subtextually, it’s also a jab at the era’s gendered expectations. Women are tasked with producing heirs, judged for “success” or “failure,” while the outcome is governed by randomness - timing, fertility, miscarriage, sex, the unpredictable cooperation of bodies. Calling Chance a deity is cynical but clarifying: the altar is the marriage bed, the priest is probability, and everyone else is pretending the ritual obeys their rules.
Balzac doesn’t romanticize uncertainty; he weaponizes it against self-deception. The result is a sentence that punctures sentimental narratives and exposes how fragile “destiny” looks up close.
The line works because it’s both intimate and ruthless. “My dear” carries the conversational softness of a salon aside, the tone of someone offering reassurance. Then the reassurance curdles: you are not in charge. The aristocratic diction (“sovereign,” “deity”) doesn’t elevate childbirth; it mocks the human need to narrate it as meaningful and controllable. Balzac’s France was obsessed with inheritance, legitimacy, and social continuity, yet the raw mechanics of conception remain laughably indifferent to those anxieties. The phrase is a miniature realist manifesto: society’s elaborate systems of status and propriety rest on a biological roulette wheel.
Subtextually, it’s also a jab at the era’s gendered expectations. Women are tasked with producing heirs, judged for “success” or “failure,” while the outcome is governed by randomness - timing, fertility, miscarriage, sex, the unpredictable cooperation of bodies. Calling Chance a deity is cynical but clarifying: the altar is the marriage bed, the priest is probability, and everyone else is pretending the ritual obeys their rules.
Balzac doesn’t romanticize uncertainty; he weaponizes it against self-deception. The result is a sentence that punctures sentimental narratives and exposes how fragile “destiny” looks up close.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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