Bel Ami

A penniless cavalry veteran with a good moustache is given a job on a Paris newspaper, and discovers that every rung of the ladder above him is a woman. Maupassant was trained by Flaubert, who made him rewrite for seven years before letting him publish, and he wrote this in the middle of the press-and-politics world he was watching from inside. Nothing in it punishes the scoundrel.