In melodrama a secret agent was never tired or uninterested or in love with a dead woman. But perhaps L. read melodramas—he represented, after all, the aristocracy—the marquises and generals and bishops—who lived in a curious formal world of their own, jingling with medals that they awarded to each other: like fishes in a tank, perpetually stared at through glass, and confined to a particular element by their physiological needs. They might take their ideas of the other world—of professional men and working people—partly from melodrama. It was wrong to underestimate the ignorance of the ruling
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Perspective Of the republic
