Reading Edwardian era comic novels, one of the hard things to wrap my head around is that butlers and valets aren't old! In fact the valets are often young men! I wonder if it's just that by the time I was born, being a butler or valet was mostly aging servants from a different era?
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Like Edmund and the Prince in “Blackadder the Third”, where they were roughly the same age but unequal in *every other way*. And while society values one man, it ought to value the other.
Valet is someone who just looks after one guy and has a sort of companionship aspect particularly when travelling
they can't be your friend, because they're not your social peer
but they can be company
A valet by contrast was low ranking and thus likely to be young.
Butlers I'd expect to have served in lower positions first and thus would be older.
* likely from one or two specific TV depictions
But yeah, Wadsworth from Clue is an accurate depiction.