Marriage Quote by Alphonse Karr

Karr’s line lands like a romantic slogan, then twists the blade: the real target isn’t love, it’s the way bourgeois marriage turns love into a finished product. Calling marital love “the accomplishment of a beautiful dream” suggests love should arrive as a lived achievement, something continuously built and renewed. The sting is in the second clause: “and not... the end.” He’s mocking a social script where courtship is the story and marriage is the closing credits, where the wedding functions less as a beginning than as a bureaucratic full stop.

As a 19th-century French critic, Karr is writing in a world where marriage is still heavily shaped by property, reputation, and family strategy, even as the era’s literature sells the intoxicating ideal of romantic destiny. That mismatch is his fuel. The subtext is that society rewards the performance of love up to the altar - the letters, the longing, the chase - but provides few structures that honor tenderness afterward. Marriage becomes an institution that legitimizes possession more than intimacy: once the “dream” is secured, the work of dreaming is abandoned.

The sentence works because it’s deceptively simple. “Accomplishment” is aspirational and active; “the end” is flat, terminal, faintly comic. Karr isn’t just advising couples to try harder. He’s critiquing a culture that treats love as a pre-marital proof-of-purchase, then acts surprised when the relationship is left with status and routine instead of wonder.