Balzac belongs to canonical French literature but has nowadays few readers among those who learn French as a foreign language in Germany. However, outside of literature classes, there is a broad interest in classic texts and authors on social media platforms such as Instagram. This contribution displays an approach to connect social media as a platform for entertainment, communication, spending free time and gathering information with authentic, user-generated, image-based sources that document reading activities in a creative, global, multilingual and subjective way. Using the hashtag analysis, the article shows how learners perceive a cultural artifact embedded in its literary discourse. Moreover, it demonstrates how they can decode and interpret these artifacts across various media, considering their inter- and transmedial referentiality and relevance to cultural memory, and to respond to them in a subjective and aesthetic manner.