In Emma’s day, mass-produced culture had not yet reached the masses; it was still a bourgeois affair and mixed up, characteristically, with a notion of taste and discrimination—a notion that persists in advertising. Rodolphe in his château would be a perfect photographic model for whiskey or tobacco. Emma’s “tragedy” from her own point of view is her lack of purchasing power, and a critical observer might say that the notary’s dining-room simply spelled out the word “money” to her. Yet it is not as simple as that; if it were, Emma’s head would be set straighter on her shoulders. What has happened to her and her spiritual sisters is that simulated-oak wallpaper has become itself a kind of money inexpressible in terms of its actual cost per roll. Worse, ideas and sentiments, like wallpaper, have become a kind of money too and they share with money the quality of abstractness, which allows them to be exchanged. It is their use as coins that has made them trite—worn and rubbed—and at the same time indistinguishable from each other except in terms of currency fluctuation. The banalities exchanged between Léon and Emma at their first meeting (“And what music do you prefer?” “Oh, German music, which makes you dream”) are simply coins; money in the usual sense is not at issue here, since both these young people are poor; they are alluding, through those coins, to their inner riches.