Fatherhood Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac slips a knife into the polite fiction of “free choice” with a question that sounds idle but isn’t. A stationer rather than a baker: the contrast is deliberately unglamorous, a refusal to let ambition hide behind lofty vocations. He’s asking why anyone ends up in one small trade and not another once heredity stops acting like law. The phrase “It would be curious” is doing social camouflage, performing civility while staging an interrogation of modern life.

The Egyptian aside sharpens the cynicism. In ancient caricature, a man becomes his father by default; in post-revolutionary France, Balzac implies, the compulsion hasn’t vanished, it’s just been laundered. Family capital, apprenticeship networks, guild leftovers, marriage prospects, neighborhood reputations, access to credit, the silent curriculum of class taste: these replace the pharaoh’s decree with something more plausible and therefore harder to challenge. You’re “not compelled,” yet you’re channeled.

Balzac’s deeper target is the bourgeois story that the market liberated the individual. His novels are crowded with characters who believe they’re self-made while being steered by money, etiquette, and desperation. Choosing “stationer” also nods to paper, contracts, and bureaucracy - the literate infrastructure of a society that sells itself as meritocratic. The baker feeds bodies; the stationer supplies the paperwork that organizes who gets to eat, own, inherit, and belong.

The line works because it treats destiny not as tragedy but as logistics. Balzac’s realism is less about documenting streets than about exposing the invisible rails beneath them.