The Mandarin
A shabby copy-clerk in a Lisbon ministry reads in a battered folio that he may kill an aged mandarin at the far end of China by ringing a small bell, and inherit millions no law and no witness could trace back to him. He rings it. The moral puzzle underneath had circulated in French since Chateaubriand's Génie du christianisme, and Eça spun it into the lightest and strangest thing he ever published.
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