"The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste"
About this Quote
Balzac is poking a pin through the pious balloon of 19th-century respectability. By pairing "most virtuous" with "never chaste", he stages a deliberate contradiction: virtue as society advertises it is less a natural state than a performance maintained under surveillance. The line works because it refuses the era's tidy binaries. Women are either Madonna or fallen; chastity is either intact or ruined. Balzac insists that the inner life doesn't cooperate.
The key move is the vagueness of "something within them". He doesn't name lust, desire, imagination, ambition, or curiosity, because naming would let moralists domesticate it. Instead, he suggests an irreducible interiority - a private weather system - that cannot be policed by manners, marriage, or confession. "Never chaste" isn't a claim about behavior so much as about consciousness: thoughts, fantasies, impulses, and the sheer fact of wanting. Chastity, in this framing, is a social credential; the self is messier.
Context matters: Balzac's Comedie humaine is essentially a catalog of how class, money, and reputation warp intimacy. He saw bourgeois morality as a technology for managing property, lineage, and appearances, with women cast as both symbol and collateral. The sentence carries cynicism, but also a sly defense. If even the "virtuous" contain the unchaste, then moral purity is a rigged standard - and judging women by it becomes not just cruel, but absurd. Balzac doesn't let his readers enjoy their hypocrisy unchallenged; he makes it visible, then makes it laughable.
The key move is the vagueness of "something within them". He doesn't name lust, desire, imagination, ambition, or curiosity, because naming would let moralists domesticate it. Instead, he suggests an irreducible interiority - a private weather system - that cannot be policed by manners, marriage, or confession. "Never chaste" isn't a claim about behavior so much as about consciousness: thoughts, fantasies, impulses, and the sheer fact of wanting. Chastity, in this framing, is a social credential; the self is messier.
Context matters: Balzac's Comedie humaine is essentially a catalog of how class, money, and reputation warp intimacy. He saw bourgeois morality as a technology for managing property, lineage, and appearances, with women cast as both symbol and collateral. The sentence carries cynicism, but also a sly defense. If even the "virtuous" contain the unchaste, then moral purity is a rigged standard - and judging women by it becomes not just cruel, but absurd. Balzac doesn't let his readers enjoy their hypocrisy unchallenged; he makes it visible, then makes it laughable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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