For more information on the published version, visit Project Muse's Website. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707618

Jacob Sider Jost is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

Proust's À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs contains a description of a decorated share certificate issued by a Parisian water utility; I establish that Proust remembered or referred to an actual action from the Compaignie Générale des Eaux, and I reproduce a contemporary bond certificate with the same decorated border. This artifact is significant because the juxtaposition of its border—adorned with flowers, beautiful girls, and madeleine-shaped shells—with its function as a financial instrument illuminates larger themes in the Recherche: the homologies between social and financial markets and between capital accumulation and the composition of a novel.

Sider Jost, Jacob. Proust and the Water Company:
A Nineteenth-Century Bond. MLN 133, no. 4 (2018): 858-864. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707618