Abstract: By studying the representation of money in the Rougon-Macquart, this contribution analyses the status of the economic topos in the naturalist text, in comparison with models in Balzac and Dickens. In Pot-Bouille, we see the ironic exhaustion of a theme treated in a hyperbolic register ; in La Joie de vivre, the language of economics infiltrates the “psychological” text ; in Au Bonheur des Dames, the metaphor of liquidity imposes itself on the modern world of circulation.
