Marriage Quote by Sacha Guitry

Jealousy is supposed to make men heroic; Guitry makes it clerical. The line lands because it flips the expected moral math of adultery. Instead of the wounded husband reclaiming honor through violence or melodrama, the “revenge” is a shrug weaponized into strategy: let the other guy inherit the problem. It’s cruelty disguised as composure, and composure disguised as sophistication.

Guitry’s intent is less self-help than social sabotage. In one sentence he smuggles in a whole theory of marriage as bargain, not sacrament. The wife is framed not as a person but as an encumbrance, a status object that can suddenly depreciate. That’s the joke’s darkest engine: the speaker treats betrayal as proof the “stolen” item wasn’t worth keeping. The husband’s pride survives by rewriting loss as relief.

Subtextually, it’s also a performance of masculine modernity. By refusing the traditional script (duel, scandal, tragedy), the narrator claims superiority over both adulterer and spouse. His “revenge” is to deny them the drama they want; indifference becomes a form of control. The cynicism is pointed, but it’s also protective: if you can laugh at humiliation, you don’t have to feel it.

Context matters. Guitry, a boulevard playwright-director steeped in Parisian wit and sexual farce, wrote for a culture that prized bons mots and treated romance as a stage for ego. The line isn’t a manifesto; it’s a perfectly sharpened epigram from a world where love is negotiable and dignity is a punchline you deliver before someone delivers it for you.