Word: stendhal
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...Telegraph, by Stendhal. Book Two of Stendhal's "third masterpiece," Lucien Leuwen; a savage and witty satire on the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe (TIME...
...object of Stendhal's satire is the cheap-jack kingery of Louis Philippe-that "crowned calculating machine"-and the belowstairs thimblerigging of the corrupt, bureaucrazed regime through which he misgoverned France...
...scandal that might have brought the cabinet down. Soon after, he is in the thick of a provincial election, passing out bribes as easily as breathing. In all this stock jobbery, the newly invented telegraph serves the political and financial turn of the men in power so often that Stendhal sees the instrument as a symbol of corruption...
Lucien quits politics and goes back to the girl he left in Book One, but since Stendhal did not finish the novel, Lucien does not quite reach...
Unfinished as it is, Lucien Leuwen is a true coin of Stendhal's genius; only the edges want milling. It ranks almost with The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, the great novels which Stendhal wrote before & after it; and it marks the mid-point in his development from a powerful psychologist who couldn't help laughing at the people he created, to a deadly satirist who couldn't stop creating the people he laughed...