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 built the Human Comedy; this is his anatomy of the civil service, and every reader who has ever worked in an institution will recognize the machinery. Fifty-eight plates, among them Daumier and Boilly, turn the same comic eye on clerks, connoisseurs and paper mills that Balzac turns on the office.