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Love Quote by Honore de Balzac

"Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane"

About this Quote

Balzac’s line pops like a cork and then goes flat on purpose. He stages romance as a tiny lifecycle: the first act is Champagne, the beverage of performance, money, and social permission. It fizzes with spectacle - the flirtation that’s also a negotiation, the thrill that you’ve been chosen, the sense that desire is a party you can host. Then comes tisane, the humble herbal infusion associated with the sickbed, the domestic routine, the body that needs soothing rather than seducing. It’s not just a joke about aging; it’s a theory of how passion gets metabolized into care.

The intent is acidic, not sentimental. Balzac is pointing at the class mechanics of love: Champagne implies salons, expense, public display. Tisane implies the private room, thrift, and maintenance. The subtext is that romance is often fueled by the theater of status, and it often ends in the unglamorous labor of living with someone - or simply enduring the aftermath of what you thought would stay effervescent.

Context matters: Balzac wrote in a 19th-century France newly obsessed with bourgeois ambition and social climbing, where marriage could be strategy as much as devotion. His fiction is crowded with people trying to drink their way into a better life. The punchline lands because it refuses the modern fantasy of endless spark. He gives you a bracing alternative: love isn’t ruined when it becomes tisane; it’s revealed. When the bubbles fade, you find out whether it was desire for a person, or desire for the feeling of Champagne.

Quote Details

TopicRomantic
Source
Later attribution: Inspirational Quotes For All Occasions (Bangambiki Habyarimana, 2013) modern compilationISBN: 9781304343147 · ID: nXm6BQAAQBAJ
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane. ~Honoré de Balzac Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and ...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Balzac, Honore de. (2026, February 27). Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/great-love-affairs-start-with-champagne-and-end-24213/

Chicago Style
Balzac, Honore de. "Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane." FixQuotes. February 27, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/great-love-affairs-start-with-champagne-and-end-24213/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane." FixQuotes, 27 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/great-love-affairs-start-with-champagne-and-end-24213/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Honore Add to List
Champagne to Tisane: Balzac on Love Transformation
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About the Author

Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850) was a Novelist from France.

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