Abstract: For Stendhal, real heroes do not think about money. And when they do their accounts, the novelist distinguishes between small sums, detailed and negative because they are linked to those who are poor and miserly or to mean shopkeepers, and astronomic figures, fabulous and positive, associated with the novelistic genre and the privileged. Money is more or less dirty depending on the amounts and the people concerned, a difference of representation which betrays the aristocratic prejudices of the author.