The paper discusses two characters of speculators as shown in two 19th century novels. Zola’s Aristide Saccard incarnates fever, chaos and prodigality of a provincial who has become a millionaire pursuing his dream of fortune. Guy de Maupassant’s William Andermatt is a banker whose extraordinary capacity of making money is based on rationalism, cold calculation and exceptional intuition. Despite all the differences, they both embody three basic features of a businessman: desire, will and power.

Zola's novel world can be seen as a play of forces that takes place in a strictly defined spatial configuration between aspirational characters striving to realize their desires; the body in motion becomes their expressive medium. Always semantically marked, movement is not only understood as the hero's movement between points in space. In this analytical perspective, based on the body of La Curée et L`Argent, the movement becomes the embodiment of the will / desire, the transformation of thought into action, what is potential into real.