A great meal, no doubt. It's worth remarking the lowly status of vin rosé, as a beverage just a notch above water, and the lavish use of noble wines such as champagne and Tokay as cooking liquids. One can only speculate about the five different wines destined for that graded slope of stemware: champagne, white burgundy, red burgundy, claret, port?
Later in the novel Frédéric has lunch with Arnoux, and again Flaubert takes pains to be precise about what they ate and drank: "[...] he carried him off to lunch at Parly's in the rue de Chartres; and as he needed to restore his strength, he ordered two meat dishes, a lobster, a rum omelette, a salad, and so on, washing all this down with an 1819 Sauterne and '42 Romanée, not to mention the champagne at dessert and the liqueurs."
1842 is not listed as one of the great 19th-century vintages for Burgundy by the legendary Jasper Morris, in his book Inside Burgundy (Berry Bros and Rudd Press, £50). Those vintages were, Jasper says (millionaires take note): 1819, 1822, 1827, 1846, 1858, 1864, 1865, 1869, 1870, 1886 and 1893. It is hard to get any information about 19th-century vintages of Sauternes. But two aspects of this meal at Parly's stand out. The first is that Frédéric and Arnoux seem to have drunk their wines in what we would think of as the wrong order: they begin with Sauternes, move on to red Burgundy, and then finish with champagne (which probably of course was sweet — and in south-west France today sweet wines are often served as an apéritif). Secondly, they are not concerned about properties and growers — they buy by appellation.
Flaubert may have included this specificity over drink merely to enhance his novel's documentary thickness. But whatever his intentions, the foregrounding of wine also harmonised with the novel's great historical theme of Romanticism and its hangover. In L'Education Sentimentale Flaubert emerges as the laureate of the crapulous, as he depicts the whole French nation staggering groggily out of the intoxication of the Napoleonic era. The emotional keynote of the novel is that of sour awakening to a dejecting truth. It is a note struck repeatedly, perhaps most vividly when Mme Arnoux visits Frédéric to offer herself to him, and without thinking takes off her hat: "The lamp, standing on a console table, lit up her white hair. It was like a blow full in the chest."
