Love & Passion Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Fidelity, La Rochefoucauld suggests, is often less a triumph of virtue than a shortage of opportunity. The line has the clean, courtly bite of a man who watched desire in close quarters - not in pastoral romance, but in salons and corridors where status, flirtation, and calculation formed their own economy. Its elegance is part of the weapon: the sentence sounds like a simple observation, then quietly turns into an indictment.

The “first lover” isn’t celebrated; they’re “kept,” a verb that drains the relationship of spontaneity and replaces it with management. Love becomes inventory. And the conditional clause - “when no offer is made of a second” - supplies the real engine of the maxim: constancy is framed as the absence of competing bids. La Rochefoucauld’s subtext is that what we call devotion frequently rests on circumstances that flatter us: limited access, fear of social cost, or the comforting illusion that no better deal is available.

This is classic Rochefoucauld: moral psychology delivered as social realism, polished to aphoristic cruelty. Writing in a 17th-century aristocratic world where marriages were strategic and affairs were both currency and theater, he treats the heart like a marketplace and refuses to romanticize the transaction. The sting is not merely that people cheat; it’s that they may never have been faithful in the first place - merely untempted.

The maxim also needles vanity. If you’ve been “kept a long while,” don’t rush to congratulate your charm. You may have simply enjoyed a temporary monopoly.