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His superior, the choleric La Hourmerie, explodes in lectures and threats, yet the clerk stays on while the files pile up untouched. The episode shows a system whose sanctions act only on the paperwork of attendance, never on the work itself.
The ronds-de-cuir fill each day with rituals: arriving, warming themselves, lunching, gossiping, trimming pens, carrying files from desk to desk. These routines take real effort and follow strict etiquette, so the office looks busy and orderly while producing almost nothing. Idleness here is not a gap in the structure. It is what the structure is built to produce.
So authority turns into noise, and chiefs end up more anxious about their subordinates than the subordinates are about them. Rank survives as ceremony after it has lost the power to make anyone act.
Look at an administration from inside the office, and the citizens it exists to serve disappear. Here those are the donors, heirs and legatees whose bequests stall for years. What remains is the file, the signature and the internal quarrel, and a case matters only as an object passed between desks. The lens explains how an office can be sincerely busy with its own procedures and still indifferent to the human outcome.