I actually had in mind just
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket but I was working from memory. I recalled it was not very long but not as short as it turns out to be.
I think it would be a bit messy to pile together three of the La Comédie humaine books; I am fine with just the
...Cat and Racket story by itself but if considered too short I'll hunt out something else.
While it has been a long time since I read it the first of the longer books in the series,
Letters of Two Brides and it being the third, is maybe too long and involved to just be a simple vignette of an element of society?