Billets à ordre Bouches du Rhône Marseille

Landel & Cie was a Marseille trading house, not a bank, and these billets à ordre — promissory notes rather than banknotes proper — circulated as commercial paper within the port's merchant networks. The Bouches-du-Rhône stamp paper on which they were printed was a fiscal requirement: French law mandated that negotiable instruments be executed on government-stamped stock, the tax pre-embedded in the paper itself.

Eugène Oudine was a medallist and engraver at the Paris Mint, best known for his coin work — his appearance in a Marseille commercial paper context suggests a licensed or borrowed vignette rather than a bespoke commission.