Parenting & Family Quote by Honore de Balzac

Finance gets cast as a parent and a predator at once: a system that births fortunes and then eats the very people who make them. Balzac’s line lands because it borrows the old mythic dread of time (Saturn swallowing his children) and updates it for a modern world where money has started behaving like a force of nature. Time consumes indiscriminately; finance, Balzac implies, does it with receipts.

The intent is less moral scolding than anatomical description. Finance isn’t merely “greed” in human form; it’s a machine that requires constant feeding - risk, speculation, leverage, reputation - and eventually feeds on those inputs when the cycle turns. The “children” are entrepreneurs, heirs, clerks, gamblers, even the newly respectable bourgeoisie: people finance creates as social types and then ruins through debt, bubbles, lawsuits, liquidation, or the slow erosion of character. Balzac’s genius is that he makes catastrophe feel structural, not accidental.

Subtext: the new French order after the Revolution and Napoleon is supposed to be rational, meritocratic, clean. Instead, it has simply swapped aristocratic bloodlines for balance sheets, with an equally brutal logic of succession. The phrase “like time” is the knife twist - finance isn’t an unfortunate human invention we can outgrow; it mimics a primordial law.

In Balzac’s universe, money is narrative gravity. It organizes desire, love, and status, then exposes them as collateral. That’s why the line works: it turns an abstract system into a family tragedy, and suggests the tragedy is the system’s point, not its malfunction.