Great love affairs start with champagne and end with tisane.

The line contrasts the sparkling, performative beginnings of romance with its quieter, more medicinal end. Champagne suggests novelty, seduction, expense, and social display—the heightened mood of courtship and the illusion of endless possibility. Tisane (a herbal infusion often associated with convalescence) evokes fatigue, routine, and the body’s limits: love’s aftermath as recovery rather than celebration. Read this way, the aphorism is less about cynicism than about the arc from intoxication to sobriety, from passion’s theater to the domestic or depleted realities that follow. It also hints at Balzac’s recurring interest in how desire is shaped—and eventually worn down—by time, health, and social circumstance.