A novel set in Paris in the 1880s. Georges Duroy is a handsome, penniless former soldier with little talent but great charm and ambition. Through an old friend he enters the world of newspapers, politics and fashionable salons, and he learns to use the women who admire him as steps on a ladder. The book is a sharp portrait of social climbing, press influence and the hollow values of a prosperous society. Its antihero is unlikeable yet fascinating, and the novel remains one of the best-known studies of opportunism in French literature.