There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.

The line sets up a stark antithesis: “love” as an ideal—tender, absolute, and meaning-giving—versus “life” as the force that corrodes ideals through compromise, routine, and disappointment. By calling life love’s “enemy,” the speaker suggests that love thrives on intensity and purity, while lived experience introduces fatigue, self-interest, social constraint, and the slow attrition of feeling. The phrasing (“of course”) also carries a weary irony, as if love is acknowledged as a cultural given, but immediately undercut by the harsher truth of existence. In Anouilh’s dramatic world, this often aligns with characters who prefer uncompromising ideals to the muddied bargains of ordinary living.