France also affected his taste: for the rest of his life, Deng enjoyed drinking wine and coffee and eating cheese and bread. More important, by the time he left France at age twenty-one, Deng had become a hardened and experienced revolutionary leader, and his personal identity had become inseparable from that of the party and his Communist comrades. From that time until his death seven decades later, Deng's life was focused on the Chinese Communist Party.
