Bureaucracy

1838

Balzac's 1838 satire of the Paris ministries, in which the honest division head Rabourdin drafts a plan to halve the civil service and is quietly destroyed by the clerks it would displace. Nine chapters of office intrigue turn on a vacancy at the top, his wife's salon, and the secretary-general des Lupeaulx. Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.