We now see how it was that Flore Brazier obtained the management of the Rouget household,--from father to son, as young Goddet had said.

It is desirable to sketch the history of that management for the edification of old bachelors.
Fanchette, the cook, was the only person in Issoudun who thought it wrong that Flore Brazier should be queen over Jean-Jacques Rouget and his home.

She protested against the immorality of the connection, and took a tone of injured virtue; the fact being that she was humiliated by having, at her age, a crab-girl for a mistress,--a child who had been brought barefoot into the house.

Fanchette owned three hundred francs a year in the Funds, for the doctor made her invest her savings in that way, and he had left her as much more in an annuity; she could therefore live at her ease without the necessity of working, and she quitted the house nine months after the funeral of her old master, April 15, 1806.
That date may indicate, to a perspicacious observer, the epoch at which Flore Brazier ceased to be an honest girl.
The Rabouilleuse, clever enough to foresee Fanchette's probable defection,--there is nothing like the exercise of power for teaching policy,--was already resolved to do without a servant.

For six months she had studied, without seeming to do so, the culinary operations that made Fanchette a cordon-bleu worthy of cooking for a doctor.