Pelf – money; riches; but it often conveys the idea of something ill gotten or worthless
“The writer of this legend then records
Its ghostly application in these words:
The image is the Adversary old,
Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold,
Our lusts and passions are the downward air;
The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;
Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;
The knights and ladies, all whose flesh and bone
By avarice have been hardened into stone;
The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelf
Temps from his books and from his nobler self.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus