Bureaucracy

Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Honoré Daumier, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jacques-Louis David. A ministry clerk of real ability is up for a vacant headship, and his wife runs a salon to get it for him — against a colleague who has understood that in an office the work is not the point. Balzac wrote at night on fifty cups of coffee a day and died at fifty-one having bui...