50 Euros Odette de Crécy

Part of the Monnaie de Paris series honoring characters from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, this piece commemorates Odette de Crécy — the courtesan whose calculated social ascent through the Guermantes set forms one of Proust's sharpest dissections of Third Republic bourgeois ambition. The series was issued on the centenary of the novel's first volume, Du côté de chez Swann, published in 1913 after Proust famously self-financed the edition following rejection by Gallimard.