The same ignorant abuse of wine as a mere instrument of ostentation is visible when Rex visits Charles in Paris. They go out to dinner at Paillard's, then a famous restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, and eat and drink sublimely:

I remember the dinner well — a soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white-wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviar aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bèze of 1904.

These splendours are wasted on Rex, who smokes with the red burgundy, and who dismisses the fine old cognac Charles requests in favour of something more "treacly" in a "vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort".