The dialogic properties of the relationship between money and the “improper” forms a very interesting curve. It starts with Stendhal’s Rome, Naples et Florence (third edition, of 1826) and ends at Balzac’s La Maison Nucingen. We have here two brains, two texts, two vocabularies, two discourses, in mutual dialogue, complementing and correcting each other. For the “Voyageur” visiting Italy, what is improper is the power of conventions, the ferocious class and rank consciousness displayed by the Englishman, the love of money, which exhausts him. But in La Maison Nucingen the notion, originated in England – the country of credit and of banks – necessarily changes status. It ceases being a form of antisocial protest, of sociological analysis, the beginning of a pessimistic and dark portrait of modern humanity, and becomes a kind of “omniconvention”, a blank cheque given to money.