Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred de Vigny

A fact, de Vigny suggests, is never content to stay factual. It molts. You watch it, supposedly with "your own eyes", and still it slips the leash: the chrysalis hardens into story, the larval datum into something airborne, patterned, seductive. The image is Romantic, but not merely decorative. It’s a quiet provocation aimed at the era’s faith in observation and reason: even the eyewitness, even the empiricist, can’t stop meaning from accreting. Reality doesn’t arrive as a finished, neutral package; it arrives as raw material already leaning toward narrative.

The sentence is built to implicate the reader. That opening question isn’t gentle; it’s a dare. If you deny the metamorphosis, you’re either naive about your own perception or pretending you’re immune to the human need to shape events into a legible arc. "By degrees" matters: de Vigny isn’t describing a lie suddenly told, but the slow, almost natural process by which memory edits, desire embellishes, and language upgrades the plain into the significant. Fiction, here, isn’t a counterfeit; it’s a higher-order form of explanation, a way facts become emotionally and morally usable.

Contextually, de Vigny sits in French Romanticism’s argument with the Enlightenment: not an anti-reason tantrum, but an insistence that the world is experienced through imagination as much as through measurement. The subtext reads like an early diagnosis of our media age, too: once a "fact" enters circulation, it begins evolving into a story people can carry, share, and weaponize.