Marriage Quote by Christopher Hampton

Prestige, here, is revealed as a particularly nasty currency: not admiration earned but virtue toppled. Hampton’s line is engineered like a toast raised in a drawing room and sharpened into a blade. The speaker doesn’t want the woman so much as the story of her downfall, the social proof that he can crack what everyone else reveres. “Strict morals,” “religious fervor,” “the happiness of her marriage” aren’t descriptions of a person; they’re the locks on a safe. Seduction becomes a heist, and the prize is reputational theater.

The intent is less erotic than competitive. Hampton frames desire as a status game where the target’s goodness is what makes her “prestigious” to conquer. That’s the subtext: this isn’t about intimacy, it’s about domination disguised as charm. The line also smuggles in contempt for the moral order itself. By stacking virtues into a tidy list, it treats them like pompous props begging to be kicked over. The rhetorical question lands as a wink to fellow cynics: we’re supposed to hear the rot under the sophistication.

As context, Hampton’s work often dissects polished spaces where language is a weapon and transgression is marketed as taste. This sounds like the voice of a man for whom society’s ideals are valuable only as obstacles, and women’s identities are read as public symbols first, private lives second. It’s a compact portrait of predatory vanity: seduction as résumé line, scandal as social climbing. The brilliance is how it makes the ugly motive sound, for a moment, perfectly reasonable.