The novel is studded with such realisations of the damage that time can inflict on desire — damage for which wine, which when taken in excess first elates and then dejects, may stand as no bad metonym.

But Flaubert also uses wine to hint at a contrasting truth. Frédéric and his prostitute-mistress, the Marshal, escape from the revolutionary turmoil of Paris to Fontaine-bleau, where they have a simple meal: "They were served a spatchcock chicken, an eel stew in a pipe-clay compote-dish, rough wine, and hard bread. The knives had jagged blades. It all enhanced their pleasure, added to the illusion."

What might this rough wine have been?  1848 was before the construction of France's railways, and so only the grandest of wines — and this was clearly not one — would have been transported far. No wine is now made around Fontainebleau. The nearest vineyards today are those of the easternmost Loire. Might this have been a wine from Orléans (today, as Hugh Johnson sharply remarks, "best known for vinegar"), or from the Côteaux du Giennois? It is impossible to say. But we should not overlook the fact that Frédéric relishes it far more than the flight of great vintages he drank at the house of the Marquis de Cisy, and more than the Romanée '42 he drank with the man he had so often cuckolded in his thoughts.