A Moveable Feast has long been hailed as one of the seminal texts of the Lost Generation, capturing the romanticism and restlessness that bohemian American expatriates experienced in the decade following The Great War. Published posthumously in 1964, three years after Ernest Hemingway’s abrupt suicide via double-barrel shotgun, the book is a melancholy romp through the streets, cafés, and artist studios of Paris in the early 20th century.

It features a cast of characters so star-studded – we meet Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald – that there can be no question as to the book’s rightful designation as the definitive snapshot of Modernist literature and expat life in the first half of the last century. But for all the fanfare surrounding the book, few writers have examined the text through the lens of one of Hemingway’s most notorious vices: the drink. Fear not, daiquiri enthusiasts. Working from the 2009 Restored Edition of the text, we’ve put together a chapter-by-chapter tour of every single drink Ernest Hemingway drinks in A Moveable Feast, along with our own grading and breakdown of the kind of alcohol experience one might expect after putting down the same amount of booze as Hemingway.

Chapter 1

Our story famously opens with bad weather on the horizon, and Hemingway – or Tatie, as his first wife Hadley Richardson is fond of calling him – wastes no time in ordering himself the perfect gloomy weather drink at his local cafe, a St. James rum. Hemingway was known for taking his brown liquors neat, and here he delights in “feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.”

In the most Ernest Hemingway moment ever, a pretty girl whose face “disturbs and excites” the author pulls up a chair across the café and our hero takes this as the perfect occasion to order another rum. Shortly thereafter Tatie moves to a “half-carafe of the dry white wine” to go with his dozen portugaises (oysters from the southwest Iberian peninsula) and calls it a night.

Chapter Grade: Sad American

While we can’t in good faith recommend mixing brown liquor and dry white wine (though we’ll give credit for pairing a dry white with oysters), we can tell you that brown liquor and white wine is the perfect regimen of booze to make you feel forlorn, desultory, and just want to sit in a café all day staring vaguely creepily at a stranger.

Drink Count: 3

Chapter 2

One of the most iconic chapters in the book, we open with Tatie taking “a drink of kirsch” – a brandy distilled from the fermented juice of cherries – as he reaches the close of a long day of writing. He and his wife call on Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurs, where they are served “natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries” out of Stein’s cut-glass carafes.

Presumably this is the same “truly wonderful eau-de-vie” that Stein serves Hemingway again and again (“insisting on refilling my glass”), and all this brandy sends him into a remembrance of his time in an Italian hospital during the war, when an “old man with beautiful manners” would regularly bring him a bottle of Marsala or Campari. This reverie piques Stein’s interest, of course, and while the two are sussing out the details of this beautifully mannered old man, Hemingway takes another drink of eau-de-vie and refills his glass himself this time.

Chapter Grade: Tipsy Intellectual

We move around chronologically here a bit, but we’ll count this one as a single night of drinking, because when you’re hanging out in the apartment of one of the greatest writers, poets, thinkers, feminists, and gay icons in literary history, and when she’s just casually showing you “Picasso’s nude of the girl with the basket of flowers,” there’s no choice but to keep the brandy flowing, pile on the wine and Campari, and get a nice buzz going while you shake your intellectual feathers. Well done, Papa, A+.

Drink Count: 11

Chapter 3

In a fit of youthful romance, Hemingway proposes that he and his wife stop at “some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.” “We can have two drinks,” says his wife. You bet you can, Hadley! But, too poor to eat out, the couple decide instead to eat at home and “have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out the window with the price of the Beaune on the window.”

Chapter Grade: Date Night

Beaune is the wine capital of Burgundy, so even the cheap stuff is the good stuff, and while it’s unclear if Hemingway goes red or white here, for a home-cooked meal and a night in with the person you love, maybe even a little Netlfix and chill afterward, we say go with a French pinot noir. Bonus points here for tallying the price of the wine in your head before you even leave the apartment. That’s bohemian budgeting done right.

Drink Count: 13

Chapter 4

If there’s one thing our guy loves, it’s drinking while eating while remembering his favorite meals and drinks. Here we find Hemingway reminiscing about the “dace-like fish that were called goujon,” and you’re clowning yourself if you think Tatie has any other designs besides frying them whole and eating a plateful, bones and all. What goes with fried fish?

Hemingway goes for “a white wine that was sort of a Muscadet,” a light-bodied French wine with very little sugar and a bit of a prickly kick to it. While swallowing fish bones, Hemingway also recalls walking down to the Seine with “a liter of wine and a piece of bread and some sausage” and lolling the day away while he watches the fishermen on the river.

Chapter Grade: Halcyon Days

If portly, bearded Hemingway were to head down to the river with a liter of wine and a hunk of bread in 1957 when he started writing A Moveable Feast, there’s a chance someone might have mistaken him for a vagrant and called the cops. But when you’re living in Paris in your 20s and you’re a svelte, good-looking young man, you take your liter of wine to the river and you eat your fried fish, bones and all.

Drink Count: 17

Chapter 5

When you throw Ernest Hemingway and horses into the same pot, there’s a 99% chance someone is going to get drunk. Things start out picturesque enough: Hemingway and his wife bring a bottle of wine out to the horse track and throw it down while having their lunch outside in the grass. But after enough rips on the bottle it’s time for some horse gambling, and after winning some money on his bet Hemingway orders not one but two rounds of champagne.

Feeling lucky and letting the good times roll, our heroes stop off for “oysters and crabe Mexicaine” (crab meat seasoned with pimentos, mayo, oil, vinegar, and Worcestershire sauce) and “glasses of Sancerre,” a full-bodied, perfumey white wine. But we’re not done yet! Before we head home we indulge in a reverie about buying (and drinking) a bottle of wine from Switzerland, though Hadley’s memory of choice is the “Sion wine,” yet another Swiss wine and probably a pinot blanc, as our heroes serve it up with trout au bleu and eat it outside.

Chapter Grade: Horse Race Wasted

You’re in love, your horse ran hell-for-leather and came in first, and the money is stacking up. Days such as these come so rarely in a lifetime, so treat yourself to a bottle of wine, two glasses of champagne, some crab and Sancerre, and as much Swiss wine as you can afford, my friends. Life is good, and you are drunk out of your mind at a horse race (even if you didn’t actually drink it all on the same day, like Hemingway).

Drink Count: 23

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Chapter 6

Feeling decidedly “empty” after he decides to stop spending all day at the racetracks and gambling on horses, Hemingway asks an old friend to lunch and the two gorge on paté and bistro bread at the square Louvois over a “wonderful white wine.” It’s this same friend, Mike Mardi, who turns Hemingway onto bicycle racing, an obsession that leads to Hemingway later witnessing the skull of a cyclist “crumple under the crash helmet as you crack an hard-boiled egg against a stone to peel it on a picnic.”

Chapter Grade: Takin’ it Easy

Every drink enthusiast knows that sometimes the best medicine is no medicine at all. Or at least a very modest spoonful of medicine. When your body and your liver need to recover from all that champagne and horse-gambling fever, treat a close friend to lunch, have one glass of white wine, and try to remember why you came to Paris in the first place. To write!

Drink Count: 24

Chapter 7

Events come to a head when Hemingway pays a visit to Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus and she’s in a trash-talking mood. No writer is beyond the reach of Gertrude’s saltiness, and over the course of the chapter she trashes everyone from James Joyce to D.H. Lawrence (“he writes like a sick man”) to Ezra Pound, who apparently busted one of Miss Stein’s chairs with his heavy bum. It’s during this chapter that we hear the origin story behind the “Lost Generation” term – later used as an epigraph in Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

“That’s what you are,” Stein tells Hemingway. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.” Hemingway broods on this claim over an ice-cold beer while keeping company with a statue of Marshal Ney, French commander and one of eighteen Marshals of the Empire under Napoleon. “The hell with all her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels,” he grumbles.

Chapter Grade: Working on a Stew

Hemingway doesn't actually drink much in this chapter, shockingly enough. But Ezra Pound notwithstanding, when an intellectual expatriate sees fit to trash the greatest literary minds of your generation (be it a lost generation or not), and when your fellow WWI soldiers are also on the roasting dais, we say that a frosty, surly beer is the only thing on the menu. We'd go with a classic American pilsner. And bartender, keep em’ comin’.

Drink Count: 25

Chapter 8

Poor again and skipping meals, Hemingway is rescued from the brink of hunger when 600 francs arrive from Der Querschnitt, an avant-garde art magazine out of Germany he did some work for. After heading straight to Brasserie Lipp he asks the waiter for a distingué, a beer in “the big glass mug that held a liter” and some potato salad, too. From the pommes à l’huile he moves to a cervelas, a frankfurter-like sausage that’s “split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce.” All of this he washes down with a demi, another half-liter of beer. And another after that, of course.

Chapter Grade: Liquid Pep Talk

In his half-starved state, Hemingway starts out this chapter by treating himself to a verbal self-flagellation the likes of which we seldom see the author level against himself. “You God damn complainer,” he calls himself. Low blood sugar is a hell of a drug, so maybe we can chalk it up to finally get some potatoes and sausage in his stomach, but we’ll be damned if the liters of beer don’t go a long way toward turning Tatie’s spirits around. After putting down his first distingué, he’s talked himself into writing his first novel. Sometimes all it takes is 34 oz. of beer to convince a man to write The Sun Also Rises. In other words, thank god for beer.

Drink Count: 28

Chapter 9

This chapter’s scathing takedown of Ford Maddox Ford, author of The Good Soldier and veteran of WWI, is a master class in throwing literary shade. Hemingway is already plowing his way through the booze when Ford sits down at his café table uninvited, so it’s hard to gauge how faded Tatie is from the outset. Ford orders a “Chambéry Cassis,” which is our first signal that something is wrong, as chambéry is a botanical French vermouth made from white wine and cassis is a liqueur made from blackcurrants. Doesn’t sound like a cocktail you want to drink.

When the waiter repeats the order to Ford in confusion, Ford barks back that he ordered a fine à l’eau – a brandy with water. During the confusion Hemingway describes Ford as an “ambulatory, well-clothed, up-ended hogshead,” takes another long drink, and calls him a “heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence” to boot. When the waiter brings over the brandy, Ford snaps again and says he ordered “a Chambéry vermouth and Cassis” (which now appears to be two separate drink requests), so Hemingway offers to take the brandy off his hands while Mr. Ford orders something more to his liking.

Chapter Grade: Nemesis Wasted

With great literary power comes great literary smack talk. “Don’t you know it’s fatal for a young writer to start drinking brandy?” Ford asks our hero. And sure enough, the more brown liquor that Hemingway pours down his throat, the more incendiary he becomes. Brandy drunk is fighting drunk. And it’s not necessarily that Ford and Hemingway have a rivalry in this chapter. They seem interested in nothing more than insulting each other and proving who has the sharper tongue. Luckily for our narrator, when it’s your book you get the last word and the last laugh.

Drink Count: 31

Chapter 10

When the sun goes down after a hard day of work, writers flock to the streets and the bars that number them. After a quick memory of drinking “the good Cahors wine” (a red whose vines date back to Ancient Rome) and “diluting it about one-third with water,” Hemingway also gives his readers the insider tip that you can half-dilute Corsican wine with water and “still receive its message.”

After running into Jules Pascin at Le Dôme Café, a world-famous hangout for Left Bank intellectuals, Hemingway orders “une demi-blonde” (an 8 oz blonde beer for you non-Francophiles) and turns down a whiskey when Pascin offers to pay for it. Hemingway notes that there’s something askew with the two models that Pascin is sporting on either arm – in fact you might say one of the running themes of A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s aversion and disgust toward the kind bohemian, post-war free love that typified Paris at the time. “I go to eat with my légitime,” he says. Probably a lie given how poor he is in this chapter, but all the same he heads off to be with Hadley.

Chapter Grade: Do the Right Thing

Instead of indulging his lesser tendencies and flirting with models and generally wringing all the sugars out of caution-to-the-wind artist life in Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway drinks a light, blonde beer, turns down the whiskey, and ditches the hipsters to go be with his bae. Hadley herself is curiously absent from this chapter, but who doesn’t enjoy seeing Hemingway play the part of the upstanding, 25-year-old man during these middle chapters and tastefully handling his love for the drink?

Drink Count: 33

Chapter 11

Our vote for the most thoroughly absurd chapter in the book, in this episode we find Hemingway boxing with none other than Ezra Pound, inside Pound’s studio, which is filled with rare paintings by Japanese noblemen artists. But the real takeaway here is the arrival of Wyndham Lewis, whom Hemingway seems to hate more than anyone else on the planet, despite never having met the man. If you thought Ford Maddox Ford got a raw deal, Hemingway turns the amplifiers up to 11 on Lewis and compares his face to “toe-jam” and describes his eyes as “those of an unsuccessful rapist.” He seems so disgusted by the man that he can’t even be bothered to talk about alcohol: “We had a drink of something and I listened while Ezra and Lewis talked about people in London and Paris.”

Chapter Grade: Mind Eraser

If you should find yourself in the presence of the “nastiest man [you’ve] ever seen,” as Hemingway describes Lewis, why don’t you go ahead and order whichever cocktail has the most alcohol in it. May we recommend a double Mind Eraser? 4 ounces vodka and 4 ounces coffee liqueur, topped with club soda over ice. Suck it down and forget all about Wyndham Lewis.

Drink Count: 34

Chapter 12

And so begins the downfall, dear readers. This chapter famously finds Hemingway storming out of Stein’s apartment after he hears some suspicious, strange, probably lascivious noise coming from Gertrude’s room upstairs, where she’s alone with her companion. It’s deliberately unclear what happens here, but the general consensus is that Ernest is just plain grossed out by queer sex because it’s the 1920s and he’s Ernest Hemingway.

The terse goodbye brings Tatie’s close friendship with Stein to an end, but he does manage to sneak in two drinks “before noon” from the maidservant before it all goes south, one of an unknown name while he’s standing around staring at priceless art, and another glass of the colorless eau-de-vie from the honeymoon phase of his friendship with Stein.

Chapter Grade: Irish Goodbye

Great loves fade, friendships come and go, and nothing lasts forever, not even among legendary expats. When you feel the twilight closing in upon a relationship, order up your favorite cocktail, toast to better times, and leave without saying au revoir. It’s the Hemingway way.

Drink Count: 36

Chapter 13

Hemingway meets “the man who was marked for death”: poet, editor, and con man Ernest Walsh, who tries to swindle a free dinner out of Tatie by telling him he’ll soon be given a handsome literary award from his journal. Walsh takes Hemingway to the most expensive restaurant in the Boulevard St.-Michel, where they gulp down “expensive flat faintly coppery” marennes oysters and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, a dry Chardonnay with an oaky influence.

Walsh gets a good, rare steak, Hemingway gets two tournedos (small round cuts of beef from the end of the tenderloin) with a buttery, egg-yolky sauce Béarnaise. But why stop at one bottle when the con is on! Hemingway orders a heavy red to go with the white, a Châteauneuf du Pape, known for its notes of tar and leather and heavy on the tannins, so a colossal hangover is surely around the corner. “The Châteauneuf du Pape is not a luncheon wine,” Tatie tells us.

Walsh dies off-camera a few years later, more of a whimper than a bang, but by that time Hemingway is remembering fondly a drink he had with James Joyce at the Deux Magots, where they drank dry sherry, “although you will always read that he drank only Swiss white wine," Hemingway says.

Chapter Grade: Con Artist Wasted

You can’t prank the original prankster, as the wise man once said. So when you’re one step ahead of the long con and you’ve marked the con man across the table from you for death, you go ahead, young man. Mix the red with the white, put down two bottles with a cut of tenderloin, and finish up the night with a sherry nightcap alongside the author of Ulysses. You’ve earned it.

Drink Count: 40

Chapter 14

Following the fallout with Stein in chapter 12, A Moveable Feast moves into a darker region, one where fellow artists are odious, snake oil salesmen who stalk everywhere, and once-great Paris is changing before our very eyes. After a quick drink with Ezra Pound, who confesses to Hemingway that he’s “never read the Rooshians,” Tatie meets up with poet Evan Shipman at the Lilas, where their waiter, a native Frenchman named Jean, pours them whiskey “until the glasses were more than three-quarters full.”

Why’s Jean feeling so generous? Turns out it’s a protest against the management’s new rules, which require French waiters to shave their moustaches and wear white barman coats, like an American bar. After they finish their first heaping mugs of whiskey, Jean returns for another heavy pour, despite Hemingway pleading with him not to risk his job. “What are we going to do with these,” Hemingway asks his poet friend. “Drink them,” Shipman says. “It’s a protest.”

Chapter Grade: Solidarity Wasted

Even when it’s not your hometown, it can be heartbreaking watching while a city you love changes. Hemingway doesn’t seem to realize that American artists flooding into Paris might account for the nasty new rules that require French waiters to look and act more American (and if he does, he’s certainly not refusing the whiskey). But a man having to shave off his moustache is more than Tatie can bear. We stand with you, Jean, moustache and all. And we're counting your generous whiskey pour as three drinks.

Drink Count: 43

Chapter 15

Further proving he’s a real standup guy, Ezra Pound entrusts Hemingway with a jar of “very expensive” opium that he copped at a bar called The Hole in the Wall, to be given only in event of emergency to Ralph Cheever Dunning, a poet who is at a private clinic detoxing for, you guessed it, opium addiction. When he hears word that "Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoirquement de descendre" (“Mr. Dunning went up on the roof and categorically refuses to come down”), Hemingway deems this an acceptable emergency and delivers the jar of opium to Dunning, who calls Tatie “a bastard” and starts throwing milk bottles at him. Three in total, one of which clocks him in the back and prompts one of the book’s best lines: “For a poet he threw a very fine milk bottle.”

Chapter Grade: Does a Body Good

For those of you keeping score at home, this chapter – three quarters of the way through the book – is the first one with no consumption of alcohol! Everybody needs a day off every once in a while. Time to cleanse the system, time to detox and scrape the rust off the gears. And a perfect time to hulk up on calcium for healthy bones and teeth. Grab yourself a bottle of pure unpasteurized milk and go buck wild. Just lay off the opium, will you?

Drink Count: 43

Chapter 16

Baby Bumby is finally born into the world, and Paris is too cold for a newborn that winter. So the Hemingway family heads to the Austrian town of Schruns, where they ski away the winter and live in a warm hotel for two dollars a day. Newborn baby and fresh off a sober chapter? It’s time to drink! During their snowbound vacation they enjoy “light beer or dark beer and new wines and wines that were a year old sometimes.” There’s kirsch and “Enzian Schnapps distilled from mountain gentian,” there’s “jugged hare” for dinner with “a rich red wine sauce” made from wine that costs a bank-breaking twenty cents a liter, but of course the "ordinary red wine was much cheaper” and our heroes pack it up in kegs.

Hemingway burns a few nights away with men from the Austrian Alpine regiment, drinking and singing mountain songs, enough so that a few of the locals begin to call him the “Black Kirsch-Drinking Christ” because of his sunburn, unshorn face, and beard.

Chapter Grade: Out with a Bang

Though it happens off-camera and many years down the road, at the close of this chapter Hemingway eludes to a “murderous summer” during which he brings about the dissolution of his marriage to Hadley, presumably because he’s fallen in love with another woman. He remembers his final winter with Hadley as “a happy and innocent winter in childhood,” and that’s one possible reason that this one ranks among the heaviest-boozing chapters in the book. Dark days are ahead, but we’ll always have Austria.

Drink Count: 50

Chapter 17

At last we arrive at F. Scott Fitzgerald, star of A Moveable Feast's most notorious and damning account of literary buffoonery. The fun starts when Hemingway, in the company of some “worthless characters” at the Lilas, makes Fitzgerald’s acquaintance for the first time and they share two consecutive bottles of champagne. The fizzies seem to hit Fitzgerald with quite a punch, as his face goes pale and turns into a “death’s head,” and he appears to either have an allergic reaction or suffer a panic attack. Fitzgerald of course denies all of this the next time he sees Hemingway at the Lilas. He’s much more interested in discussing his new book, a little number he calls The Great Gatsby, while the two writers throw back a pair of whiskeys each (with no sign of allergy or anxiety this time from Scott).

Plans are made for a trip south to Lyon, but Fitzgerald is a no-show at the train station, which you can imagine pisses Hemingway right off (“I had never heard, then, of a grown man missing a train”). He calms down over lunch with a bottle of St.-Émilon, a red wine from the Bordeaux region of France. Unable to locate Fitzgerald when he arrives in Lyon, Hemingway steps out for an aperitif and meets a man who eats fire for a living, with whom he burns through two more aperitifs and eventually sits down to dinner and some Algerian wine.

Scott is drunk when he shows up at Hemingway’s hotel the next morning, so naturally Hemingway brings him to the hotel bar for a Perrier and whiskey after Fitzgerald insists on having the hotel prepare a chicken for them to take on a picnic. It’s difficult to tell if picnic chicken was à la mode in 1920s France or if Scott is just very drunk here.

Upon claiming Fitzgerald’s Renault motor car from an auto-body shop (ostensibly the reason the two took the trip in the first place), they are astonished to find that the car doesn’t have a top, which Scott doesn’t want to replace anyway, so the two literary acolytes get caught in spring rain “possibly ten times” as they drive well under the influence around France. When they’re hungry they stop for “excellent truffled roast chicken, delicious bread and white Mâcon wine,” of which Hemingway buys four more bottles and proceeds to uncork “as we needed them.”

When a heavy rainfall hits they find a hotel in Châlon-sur-Saône, where Scott undresses and lies in bed believing he is going to die of congestion of the lungs. Doctor Hemingway orders two citron pressés (lemonades) and two whiskies for remedy (“I tried to order a bottle of whiskey but they would only sell it by the drink”). While waiting for the hotel staff to bring the whiskeys and lemonades, Hemingway kills another bottle of Mâcon. After taking Fitzgerald’s temperature and assuring him that he’s not dying, another round of whiskies is ordered so that Scott can call his wife, one Zelda Fitzgerald, after which the hotel waiter appears yet again with two more double whiskies. When their clothes dry, the dirty duo head downstairs for “snails, with a carafe of Fleurie,” a velvety, floral wine, which they top off an hour later with poulard de Bresse (that is, chicken breast) with a bottle of Montagny, “a light pleasant white wine of the neighborhood.”

Scott passes out at the table with his head in his hands, but who can blame him. When they wake up and hit the road the next morning, Hemingway is careful to only order one bottle of “the lightest wine I could locate,” and when he’s finally reunited with Hadley that evening in Paris, he’ll be damned if a nightcap isn’t in order.

Chapter Grade: Legend

There’s so much drinking happening in this chapter that it’s hard not to get the spins just reading it. By the numbers, here’s the body count of bottles: two bottles of champagne, nine whiskeys, two bottles of red wine, seven bottles of white, one “Algerian wine,” three aperitifs, and one lover’s nightcap.

As if that weren’t enough, this chapter will go down in literary history as one of the most ice-cold beatings that one famous writer has ever given another. This is kind of like if Larry Bird were to tell the most embarrassing story he could think of about Bill Russell, only during the course of the story he outright calls Russell an alcoholic and a cuckold. To top it all off, Hemingway has the gall to say that Fitzgerald, after enough alcohol to kill a horse, can’t even hold his booze: “It was hard to accept him as a drunkard, since he was affected by such small quantities of alcohol.”

Drink Count: 77

Chapter 18

We’re not through with you yet, Scott Fitzgerald! After inviting the Hemingways over to their “gloomy and airless” flat and serving them “a very bad lunch that was cheered a bit by the wine but not much,” Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald treat us to a few snapshots of their famously tumultuous relationship. All-night drinking parties, hangovers from beyond the grave, bouts of colitis, even some child neglect, and Scott “was drunk now in the day time as well as the nights,” as Hemingway tells it. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald convinces the Hemingways to visit his family in Juan-les-Pins in Southeast France that June and stay in a villa, where “the single aperitif before lunch was very good and we had several more,” and a champagne party is thrown to welcome Tatie’s wife and son Bumby. Remarking time and again on Zelda Fitzgerald’s “hawk eyes,” it’s on this fateful trip that Hemingway first learns “that she was insane.”

Chapter Grade: End Times

Leaving aside the fact that Hemingway really needs to brush up on the finer points feminism in this chapter, it’s full of scenes that are hard to watch and even harder to read, not the least because we can feel how thoroughly the seams are starting to come apart in the lives of these lost-generation bohemes. Even when they are partying and guzzling champagne in southern France, no one seems to be having a terrible lot of fun. And who’s taking care of the kids, anyway?

Drink Count: 84

In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight.

Chapter 19

Our vote for the most thoroughly absurd chapter in the book – it’s worth underscoring here that a deliberate decision was made to end A Moveable Feast with this anecdote – we open on Fitzgerald and Hemingway getting wine-drunk at lunch, eating cherry tarts and ordering another carafe, when Fitzgerald tells Hem that he has a burning question. It seems Zelda is a bit of a size queen and has told Scott that the way he’s built he can “never make any woman happy” and that it’s all “a matter of measurements.”

So naturally, Hemingway takes Fitzgerald into the bathroom for a man-to-man examination, all of which happens off-camera. The verdict? “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Hemingway tells his friend. “Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues then go home and look at yourself in the mirror.” Our book abruptly flashes forward many years to the Ritz bar, presumably the same bar that is called the Hemingway Bar today. It’s long after the end of World War II and Hemingway is chatting with Georges, the barkeep. “Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone asks me about?” he says. “All those people are dead,” Hemingway tells him.

Chapter Grade: Last Man Standing

It’s lonely at the top, and even lonelier yet to see Tatie sitting all alone after the second World War, chatting up the bartender after his wife and friends, the whole glorious cast of Left-Bank Paris in the 1920s, have vanished long behind him. When you’ve reached the end of a long, taxing chapter in your life and the time has come for the doors to open on a new one, there’s only one drink we can recommend in confidence: the Hemingway Daiquiri.

Final Drink Count: 88

So What Did We Learn?

“In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food,” Hemingway writes, “and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.”

The 1920s in Paris were a time for artists and dilettantes the likes of which the world may never see again, full of romantic poverty, good bread, bad vibes, intellectual posturing, feuds, cheap oysters, and above all: alcohol. Hemingway is neither the most welcoming nor the most forgiving tour guide through the excesses and debasements of this iconic time in literary history, but if there’s one thing our Tatie does well, it’s make a decision. He knows when to ask for the Perrier and whiskey, the kirsch, the heavy Bordeaux, and he knows this because he follows his instincts.

And that’s our advice to you, friends: be decisive. Follow your gut as much as your heart, and above all stay loyal to who you are, especially while all the world around you is pretending to be immortal.

A Guided Tour of Every Drink Ernest Hemingway Drinks in A Moveable Feast