Love Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac frames romance like public health: necessary, mildly traumatic, and ultimately preventative. Calling first love a "vaccination" is a sly demotion of what culture likes to crown as sacred. He smuggles in a clinical metaphor that makes passion sound like exposure therapy: you get a controlled dose of fever, learn what it does to your judgment, and walk away with antibodies - not against love itself, but against its most destabilizing illusions.

The wit lands because it reverses the usual nostalgia. First love, in Balzac's telling, isn’t a pure origin story; it’s the inoculation that cures you of believing in origin stories. The "complaint" is doing double duty: an ailment you suffer and a grievance you keep repeating. After the first episode, you recognize the symptoms - the grand narratives, the self-dramatization, the sense that desire is destiny - and you’re less likely to be knocked flat by them again.

Context matters. Writing in post-Revolutionary, Restoration-era France, Balzac watched people navigate a society where marriage was often economic strategy and social mobility was its own romance. His fiction is crowded with characters seduced by fantasies - of status, of perfect devotion, of permanent intensity - and then educated by consequence. The line’s intent isn’t to sneer at love; it’s to praise a hard-won sophistication. First love functions as a rite of passage into adulthood’s less flattering but more accurate emotional literacy: you can still fall, but you fall with memory, and memory is a kind of immunity.