Love Quote by Alfred de Vigny

Trouble, for de Vigny, isn’t just emotional weather; it’s the engine that forces a split-screen way of living. In the “troubled hearts” where “discord reigns,” he locates two appetites that modern culture still treats as rivals: the love of the true and the love of the fabulous. The line works because it refuses the usual moral hierarchy where truth is grown-up and fantasy is childish. Instead, he frames them as siblings, “at variance” on the surface but “merge[d]” underground.

That “as I think” is doing quiet but decisive work. It softens the claim into a confession, which is very Romantic: truth isn’t handed down by institutions; it’s wrestled from inner turbulence. De Vigny suggests that the desire for facts and the desire for fables both spring from the same wound: the mind’s need to make life coherent when it isn’t. The “fabulous” isn’t escapism here; it’s a pressure valve and a meaning machine, a way to translate chaos into narrative and symbol. Meanwhile, “the true” isn’t clinical accuracy so much as an ethical craving for what can be trusted.

Context matters: writing in post-Revolutionary France, with faith in old certainties cracked and politics swinging between ideals and disillusionment, de Vigny captures a society learning that reason alone doesn’t satisfy, but myth alone can’t stabilize. The subtext is almost a defense of poetry itself: art doesn’t compete with truth; it smuggles truth in through the senses, giving the heart something it can actually live with.