Metonymy

The ronds-de-cuir. French bureaucrats, laboring all day on wooden chairs, were prone to a shine on the seat of the pants… To Lezhev, the ronds-de-cuir seemed, at first, a doleful but inevitable feature of French life but, in time, he came to understand them in a different way. Fussy, niggling, insatiable, they had some kinship with the infamous winds of Catalonia, which will not blow out a candle but will put a man in his grave.

Alan Furst, The Polish Officer