Life & Wisdom Quote by Ninon de L'Enclos

Love doesn’t usually collapse because nobody fed it; it collapses because somebody overfed it. Ninon de L’Enclos, the famously unsentimental Parisian salonniere who treated romance as both art and social strategy, flips the expected moral lesson. Starvation would imply neglect, cruelty, or fate. Indigestion is more embarrassing: love brought low by excess - too much attention, too many demands, too much narrative forced onto what began as desire.

The line works because it’s bodily. Indigestion isn’t tragic; it’s uncomfortable, ridiculous, self-inflicted. That tonal choice quietly mocks the romantic pose of noble suffering. De L’Enclos is suggesting that modern love (modern even in her time) doesn’t just need passion; it needs appetite control. Overexposure can be as deadly as absence: the constant checking-in, the compulsive reassurance, the pressure to define the relationship, the insistence that feeling must always be performed and proven. When affection becomes a full-time job, it stops tasting like pleasure.

Context matters. In 17th-century France, salons trained people to treat conversation, seduction, and reputation as intertwined. Love wasn’t a private sanctuary; it was a public sport with etiquette, rivalry, and spectacle. De L’Enclos’s realism reads like a survival tip from someone who watched infatuations burn out not from scarcity, but from saturation - when lovers try to consume each other whole. The subtext is almost libertine pragmatism: keep desire hungry enough to move, but not so stuffed it can’t breathe.