Daily Inspiration Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac doesn’t flirt with immorality here; he lounges in it, letting the reader feel the chill of recognition. The first clause, “To kill a relative of whom you are tired,” lands like a shrug, reducing murder to a household inconvenience. Then comes the pivot: “But to inherit his property afterwards.” The real obscenity isn’t the violence, it’s the administrative payoff. He’s not describing passion or rage; he’s describing the clean satisfaction of a ledger balanced in one’s favor.

The joke is engineered to expose a social truth Balzac saw everywhere in Restoration and July Monarchy France: family as a financial instrument, kinship as a legal structure for transferring wealth, affection as optional. The line’s pleasure comes from its candor about motives polite society insists are unspeakable. Everyone is supposed to mourn; everyone is also quietly waiting for the will. Balzac compresses that hypocrisy into a single, appalling punchline.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of bourgeois respectability: the culture that treats property as the highest reality will inevitably produce people who value a death less than its dividends. “Genuine pleasure” is the barb. Pleasure is usually coded as sensual, romantic, even artistic; Balzac hands it to inheritance law and turns greed into a kind of pornography for the socially acceptable. The intent isn’t to endorse monstrosity but to show how easily a money-centered world launders it into normal life.