Abstract: The author establishes link between what Balzac calls the “omniscience” of money and the omniscient narrator of the realist novel. In a society in which “all is money” (Stendhal), such supremacy reduces the spectrum of motivations and the complexity of passions to one single and unique source : money. The money-lender Gobseck affirms : “My gaze is like that of God” ; in a similar way, by centring his narrative on money, including the stock exchange, the novelist has a synoptic view of the entire “human comedy”.
