Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait." - Meaning and context.">
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
 • Part II
 • A variant, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime," has appeared as a quotation of Balzac; but it may have originated in a paraphrase in The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O'Connor, p. 47: "Balzac maintained that behind every great fortune there is a great crime." It also appears at the beginning of the novel "The Godfather," published two years earlier.
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Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.

— Honoré de Balzac

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait." in the context of "The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
 • Part II
 • A variant, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime," has appeared as a quotation of Balzac; but it may have originated in a paraphrase in The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O'Connor, p. 47: "Balzac maintained that behind every great fortune there is a great crime." It also appears at the beginning of the novel "The Godfather," published two years earlier." to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Honoré de Balzac" (Quotes, Father Goriot (1835)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Honoré de Balzac

About Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist. Along with Flaubert, he is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European literature.