L’Argent des autres (1873) is not a “true” detective novel like Monsieur Lecoq (1868)
written by the same author, Émile Gaboriau. The novel appeared in print eight years
after the publication of L’Affaire Lerouge, the first French detective novel; however,
there is no police investigation; the culprit is known from the first pages. Like his
previous novels, La Dégringolade (1871–1872) and La Corde au cou (1872–1873),
L’Argent des autres shows an evolution towards the novel of manners in which Gaboriau
reveals the failures of the society of his time. Thus, the novel depicts a dark picture of
Parisian finance. Furthermore, if there is a criminal in this serial novel, it is a woman!
Gaboriau takes his reader into the viscera of the world of money and discloses the
social mechanics of those who live off the money of others. Gaboriau denounces the
appetites of the morally corrupt society through the description of fictional spaces,
such as the Comptoir de crédit mutuel, the office of the newspaper Le Pilote financier, the
office of the speculator Lattermann, on the one hand, and of actual emblematic places
such as the Bourse, the large boulevards or the Bois de Boulogne on the other
Les terrains vagues de la fondation : ichnographies de l’urbain selon Michel Serres et Émile Gaboriau