Popular ideas are important. They constitute the social context in which administrators act, irrespective of the correctness, or even moral justness, of these views. They are as important for understanding and appraising public administration in a certain time and place as scholarly texts. Popular opinion is, however, difficult to trace in historic research. We can partly rely on newspapers and (before these) pamphlets as sources for studying the values attached to public administration, but prose and other artistic narratives are equally important.To argue the relevance of the study of prose is certainly not new, in fact, it is as old as the study of public administration. Ideas presented in fiction stick, and influence even academic thought on public administration (cf. McCurdy, 1987).This article discusses and reflects upon just one example of a non-scholarly text: Honoré de Balzac’s Physiologie de l´employé or Physiology of the Bureaucrat, published in 1841. The discussion of this text leads to a second, more general, topic also discussed in this article: the use of semi-fictional or para-literature of an ironic nature as a source for tracing popular opinion.