Her piercing eye, her olive skin, her reed-like slenderness, might have brought her an admirer in the shape of a major on half-pay, but she was content – so she said, laughing – with her own admiration. She came indeed to find her life a sufficiently pleasant one, once she had eliminated the need to concern herself about material comfort, for she went out to dinner every evening at houses in town, after a day of work that began at sunrise. With dinner provided, she had only her lunches and her rent to pay for. In addition she was given most of her clothes, and many acceptable provisions for her household supplies such as sugar, coffee, wine, etc.

By 1837, after twenty-seven years of an existence largely paid for by the Hulot family and her Uncle Fischer, Cousin Bette had resigned herself to being a nobody and allowed herself to be treated with scant ceremony. She refused, of her own accord, to go to large dinner-parties because she preferred the intimacy of family gatherings in which she had her own importance; and so she avoided wounds to her pride. Where-ever she went she seemed to be at home: in the houses of General Hulot, Crevel, the younger Hulots, Rivet – the successor to the Pons brothers, with whom she had made up her differences and who welcomed and made much of her – and with the Baroness. She knew how to ingratiate herself with the servants in these houses, too, giving them small tips from time to time and never forgetting to spend a few minutes chatting with them before going into the drawing-room. The absence of patronage with which she put herself frankly on their level earned her the servants’ good will, which it is absolutely essential for parasites to have. ‘She’s an excellent woman, and a really good sort tool’ – that was what everyone said about her. Her willingness to oblige, unlimited when not taken for granted, like her air of friendly good nature, was of course a necessary consequence of her position. She had come at last to understand what life was like in her world, having seen herself at everyone’s mercy. In the wish to be generally agreeable, she laughed in sympathy with the young people, who liked her because of that kind of adulation in her manner that always beguiles the young. She guessed and made herself the champion of the things that lay near their hearts; she was their go-between. She struck them as being the best possible person to confide in, since she had not the right to shake her head at them. Her absolute discretion earned her the trust of older people too, for, like Ninon, she had some masculine qualities. As a general rule, confidences are made to persons below one socially rather than to those above. Much more readily than we can employ our superiors in secret affairs, we make use of our inferiors, who consequently become committed sharers in our most hidden thoughts; they are present at our deliberations. Now, Richelieu considered that he had achieved success when he had the right to take part in privy councils. Everyone believed this poor spinster to be so dependent that she had no alternative but to keep her mouth shut. Cousin Bette herself called herself the family confessional. Only the Baroness, with the memory of the harsh usage that she had received in childhood from this cousin, then stronger – though younger – than she, still felt some mistrust. In any case, in shame, she would not have confided her domestic sorrows to anyone but God.

Here, perhaps, it should be remarked that the Baroness’s house preserved all its former splendour in the eyes of Cousin Bette, who was not impressed, as the newly rich ex-perfumer had been, by the signs of distress written on the worn chairs, the discoloured hangings, and the split silk. The furniture with which we live is in the same case as ourselves. Seeing ourselves every day, we come, like the Baron, to think ourselves little changed, still young, while other people see on our heads hair turning to chinchilla, V-shaped furrows on our foreheads, and great pumpkins in our bellies. These rooms were still lit for Cousin Bette by the Bengal lights of Imperial victories and shone with perennial splendour.

With the years, Cousin Bette had developed some very odd old-maidish quirks. For example, instead of following the fashion, she tried to make fashion fit her peculiarities and conform to what she liked, which was always a long way behind the mode. If the Baroness gave her a pretty new hat, or a dress cut in the style of the moment, Cousin Bette at once took it home and remodelled it according to her own ideas, completely spoiling it in the process of producing a garment or headgear reminiscent of Empire styles and the clothes she used to wear long ago in Lorraine. Her thirty-franc hat after that treatment was just a shapeless head-covering, and her dress like something out of the rag-bag. Bette was, in such matters, as obstinate as a mule; she was determined to please herself and consult no one else, and she thought herself charming in her own mode. Certainly the assimilation of the style of the day to her own style was harmonious, giving her from head to foot the appearance of an old maid; but it made her such a figure of fun that, with the best will in the world, no one could invite her on smart occasions.

The stubborn, crotchety, independent spirit, the inexplicable inability to conform, of this young woman for whom the Baron had on four different occasions found a possible husband (a clerk in his department, a regimental adjutant, an army contractor, a retired army captain), and who had also refused an embroiderer who had become a rich man since theft, had earned for her the nickname ‘Nanny’, which the Baron jokingly gave her.

But that nickname applied only to the superficial oddities, to those variations from the norm which, in one another’s eyes, we all exhibit within society’s conventions.