The title character, played by Jessica Lange with the gravity of a governess in Victorian pornography, is a spinster of about 40. Her life was sacrificed, she believes, because her family had sufficient resources to dress, groom and train only one of their girls--her cousin Adelaide (Geraldine Chaplin). Bette was sent to work in the garden, and the lucky cousin, on her death bed, nostalgically recalls the dirt under Bette's nails. When the cousin dies, Bette fully expects to marry the widower, Baron Hulot (Hugh Laurie). But the baron offers her only a housekeeper's position.

Refusing the humiliating post, Bette returns to her shabby hotel on one of the jumbled back streets of Paris, circa 1846, where the population consists mostly of desperate prostitutes, starving artists and concierges with arms like hams. Bette is not a woman it is safe to offend. She works as a seamstress in a bawdy theater, where the star is the baron's mistress, Jenny Cadine (Elisabeth Shue). The rich playboys of Paris queue up every night outside Jenny's dressing room, their arms filled with gifts. Baron Hulot does not own her, but rents her, and the rent is coming due. Bette knows exactly how Jenny works, and uses her access as a useful weapon ("You will be the ax--and I will be the hand that wields you!").

Every night, pretending to sleep, Bette watches as Wenceslas (Aden Young), the handsome young Polish artist who lives upstairs, sneaks into her room to steal the cheese from her mousetrap and a swig of wine from his jug. She offers to support him from her savings (as a loan, with interest, of course) and falls in love with him, only to learn that he has fallen in love with Jenny. ("They say," Jenny unwisely tells Bette, "that he lives with a hag. A fierce-eyed dragon who won't let him out of her sight.") Meanwhile, the baron is bankrupt and in hock to the moneylenders. His son fires the family servants in desperation. Nuncigen, a familiar figure from many of Balzac's novels, lends money at ruinous interest. And the baron's daughter Hortense (Kelly MacDonald) unexpectedly weds Wenceslas, who unwisely allows love to temporarily blind him to Jenny's more sophisticated appeals. Also lurking about is the rich lord mayor of Paris, Crevel (Bob Hoskins), who once offered Hortense 200,000 francs for a look at her body, and is now, because of her desperation, offered a 50 percent discount.

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