CHAPTER XX
Louis Henri de Bourbon-Condé—He assumes the title of Duc de Bourbon, instead of that of Prince de Condé, and is known as Monsieur le Duc—His personal appearance—He loses an eye by a shooting-accident—His military career—He becomes President of the Council of Regency on the death of Louis XIV.—His protection of John Law—His wealth—His character—His marriage with Marie Anne de Bourbon-Conti—Singular intrigue which precedes it—His indifference to his wife—His amours—The financier Berthelot de Pléneuf—Gallantries of Madame de Pléneuf—Saint-Simon’s portrait of her—Her daughter, Agnès de Pléneuf—Singular beauty and intelligence of this young girl—Violent jealousy which her mother conceives for her—Marriage of Agnès to the Marquis de Prie, who is soon afterwards appointed Ambassador at Turin—Her life at Turin—Disgrace and bankruptcy of Berthelot de Pléneuf—Financial straits of the de Pries—Madame de Prie comes to Paris to intercede with the Government on her husband’s behalf—Calumnies concerning her spread by her mother and her partisans—Her relations with the Regent.
By his marriage with Mlle. de Nantes, Louis III., Duc de Bourbon, had had nine children—three sons and six daughters—all of whom survived him.[252] The eldest son, Louis Henri, hitherto known as the Duc d’Enghien, was, at the time of his father’s death, in his eighteenth year. Like the latter, he preferred the title of Duc de Bourbon to that of Prince de Condé, and, like him, was henceforth styled Monsieur le Duc. In contrast to his father, who had been very short and rather thick-set, Louis Henri de Bourbon-Condé was tall and thin, with a long face and prominent cheek-bones. At this period, however, he was not considered an ill-looking young man, but two years later he had the misfortune to meet with an accident which disfigured him.
In the winter of 1712—that fatal winter which witnessed the successive deaths of the charming Duchesse de Bourgogne, her husband, and their eldest son, the little Duc de Bretagne—he took part in a battue at Marly with the Dauphin and that prince’s younger brother, the Duc de Berry. Monsieur le Duc and the Duc de Berry were standing facing one another, on opposite sides of a frozen pool. The latter fired at a bird, which was flying very low, and missed it; and part of the charge, rebounding from the ice, struck Monsieur le Duc in the left eye, the sight of which was destroyed.
The young prince succeeded to his father’s post of Grand Master of the King’s Household, to his government of Burgundy, and to the command of the cavalry and infantry regiments of Condé. In 1711 he took part in the Flemish campaign under Villars, and in the assault on Hordain showed that he had inherited the courage of his race. In the following year, he was in nominal command of the cavalry of the Army of Flanders, and assisted at the sieges of Douai, Le Quesnoy, and Bouchain; while in 1713 he followed Villars to the Rhine, was present at the sieges of Landau and Freiburg, and was made maréchal de camp.
In his will, Louis XIV. had named the Duc de Bourbon a member of the Council of Regency, as soon as he should reach the age of twenty-four; but on the death of le Grand Monarque, his wishes were immediately set aside, and the Regent, the Duc d’Orléans, proceeded to appoint the Council himself, with Monsieur le Duc as its president. Apart, however, from the share he took in the campaign against the legitimated sons of the late King, the Duc du Maine and the Comte de Toulouse, with the object of reducing them to the rank of simple peers of the realm, the prince appears to have occupied himself very little with politics during the first years of the Regency, and confined his activities to the financial speculations in which half Paris was then engaging. With so much ardour, indeed, did he espouse the cause of the Scotch adventurer Law that he was accused of being one of the authors of the “System” which involved the country in such disaster. Any way, he had the courage to defend the fallen idol to the very last, and when Law, his life being no longer safe in Paris, made his escape to Flanders, it was one of the Duc de Bourbon’s carriages which conveyed him to the frontier.
Very wealthy before the “System,” his great fortune was materially increased by successful speculation. In 1720 it was computed at not less than sixty million livres.
The character of the prince is very diversely estimated by his contemporaries. Some writers, such as Marais, Barbier, and Duclos, judge him severely, and describe him as hasty in temper, brusque in his manners, debauched, dishonourable, rapacious, and entirely destitute of political capacity. Others, like Saint-Simon and the Dowager-Duchess d’Orléans, recognize in him a certain merit. The former acknowledges that, with all his faults, he had “an indomitable obstinancy, an inflexible firmness;” while the mother of the Regent, whose opinions at least possess the advantage of being consistently sincere, writes of him in 1719:
“Monsieur le Duc has many good qualities and many friends. He is polished and knows how to behave well, but his attainments are not very extensive. Nor is he better informed, but there is a loftiness and a nobility in his character, and he knows how to uphold his rank.”
Louis Henri de Bourbon-Condé, in fact, was neither the odious nor the incapable person whom certain historians have depicted. His courage was indisputable; if he was rapacious, he was also generous and open-handed; if he was a bad enemy, he was also a faithful friend; he possessed cultured tastes, and beneath his love of pleasure and his apparent indifference to public affairs he concealed qualities which only required to be stimulated into activity to make of him, if not a statesman, at least a formidable party-leader.
In the summer of 1713, Monsieur le Duc was married to his cousin, Marie Anne de Bourbon-Conti, at the same time as his second sister, Mlle. de Bourbon, became the wife of the young Prince de Conti. This double marriage, which was regarded with more or less repugnance by all four of the parties concerned, affords a curious illustration of the despotism exercised by Louis XIV. over the members of the Royal House.
The death of Monsieur le Prince, in 1709, had been followed by a most acrimonious lawsuit over his will between the Condés and Contis, which, suspended for a while by the sudden demise of his successor, had been resumed with redoubled bitterness as soon as decency permitted. Nothing was further from the thoughts of the Contis than an alliance with their detested cousins, and, in point of fact, secret negotiations had been for some time in progress between them and the Orléans family for the marriage of the Prince de Conti to Mlle. de Chartres, second daughter of the future Regent.
Now, Madame la Princesse, a pious and gentle soul, had been terribly distressed by this family quarrel, and had made several futile efforts to induce the litigants to come to an arrangement. By some means, she got wind of the matrimonial negotiations just mentioned, which opened her eyes to a very natural means of accommodation which had not yet occurred to her, namely, a double marriage between her grandchildren. Aware that she herself would never be able to bring this about, she determined to appeal to Louis XIV., who had also endeavoured to reconcile the parties, and had been more than once on the point of employing his authority to put a stop to proceedings so prejudicial to the dignity of the Royal House, and who, she knew, would be the more ready to listen to her, since he could hardly fail to be extremely irritated to learn, from an outside source, of the projected marriage of the Prince de Conti and a daughter of the Duc d’Orléans.
She had not miscalculated. The King at once expressed his warm approval of her proposal, and lost no time in sending for Madame la Duchesse, whom he informed of his wishes. That lady began to remonstrate vigorously, but his Majesty “spoke to her, not as a father, but as a master who intends to be obeyed without hesitation,” and she reluctantly yielded. Next came the turn of the Princesse de Conti, who offered the same stubborn resistance, and only capitulated when the King, losing all patience, informed her that, if she refused to give her consent, he would cause the double marriage to be celebrated without it. As for the parties most nearly concerned, his Majesty did not even trouble to go through the form of consulting them, and on 9 July the marriages were celebrated, in the chapel at Versailles, by the Cardinal de Rohan.
The new Duchesse de Bourbon, who was nearly five years older than her husband, was an extremely pretty young woman, and “possessed of much intelligence, amiability, and charm of manner.”[253] Neither the attractions of her mind nor of her person, however, appear to have made any impression upon Monsieur le Duc, for which he was not perhaps wholly to blame, having regard to the peculiar circumstances in which the marriage had taken place, besides which it would seem that his wife made very little attempt to understand him. Any way, he never entertained for her the smallest affection, and the tie which bound them was never more than a nominal one.
Such being the relations between Monsieur le Duc and his consort, it was but natural that the former should have become the quarry of all the dames galantes of the time. Madame de Sabran, one time mistress of the Regent, Madame de Zurlauben, Madame de Polignac, Madame de Nesle, mother of the too-celebrated sisters who were to succeed one another in the affections of Louis XV., and other facile beauties seem to have dipped their pretty fingers freely into his coffers; but none of these liaisons was of long duration, and it was not until the prince was approaching his thirtieth year that he found a woman capable of fixing his affections.
In the closing years of the reign of Louis XIV. there lived in a magnificent hôtel at the corner of the Rues de Cléry and Poissonière a family of the name of Berthelot de Pléneuf. The father of the family, Étienne Berthelot de Pléneuf, was a wealthy Government official and army-contractor, a younger son of François Berthelot, a person of comparatively humble origin, who had amassed an enormous fortune, partly by judicious land-speculation in Canada, where he owned “estates of the value of a province,” which the King had transformed for him into the county of Saint-Laurent, and partly as a revenue-farmer and commissary. Old Berthelot had employed a considerable portion of his wealth in the purchase of lucrative Government posts and estates in France, which he distributed among his sons, to Étienne’s share falling the office of Director-General of the Powders and Saltpetres of France and the seigneurie of Pléneuf, which entitled him to style himself the seigneur de Pléneuf.
In 1696, Pléneuf, who was then about thirty-five, had married, en secondes noces, a Mlle. Agnès Riault d’Ouilly, a daughter of a rich bourgeois family, which, like his own, had been recently ennobled. The second Madame de Pléneuf, who, it may be mentioned, was nearly twenty years her husband’s junior, had been one of the prettiest girls in Paris, and in due course she became one of its most beautiful and fascinating women. “Tall, perfectly shaped, with an extremely agreeable countenance, intelligence, grace, tact, and savoir-vivre,”[254] she triumphed like a queen, and as Pléneuf, proud of her success, denied her nothing, the salons in the Rue de Cléry soon became the rendezvous of all fashionable Paris.
If in beauty and intelligence Madame de Pléneuf left little to be desired, the same, unfortunately, could not be said for her reputation. The prolonged absences of her husband with the army provided her with abundant opportunities for receiving the homage of her numerous admirers, and she took advantage of them so freely that she earned for herself the name of the Messalina of her time. To no lady in Paris did gossip ascribe so many lovers, and, in most cases, it is to be feared, with only too much justification. There was a Lorraine prince, the Prince Charles d’Armagnac; the Cardinal de Rohan; the Ducs de Duras and de la Vallière; the versatile Marquis de Dangeau, author of the famous “Journal”; Canon Destouches, father of Néricault-Destouches, the diplomatist and playwright; young La Baume, son of the Maréchal de Tallard; the Marquis de Cany, son of the War Minister Chamillard; the dashing Comte de Gacé, who, in February, 1716, fought the famous midnight duel with the Duc de Richelieu in the middle of the Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre. And the list might be considerably extended.
But if Madame de Pléneuf were an immoral, she was also a very clever woman, and displayed really remarkable address in managing her crowd of soupirants and avoiding anything approaching a scandal. “Enamoured of herself to the last degree,” writes Saint-Simon, “she desired that others should be so, but it was necessary to obtain permission. She knew how to pick and choose among her admirers, and so well did she understand how to establish her empire that complete happiness never exceeded, in appearance, the bounds of respect and propriety; and there was not one of the chosen band who dared to show either jealousy or mortification. Each one hoped for his turn, and, while waiting, the choice more than suspected was respected by all in perfect silence, without the least altercation amongst them. It is astonishing how this conduct gained her friends of importance, who always remained attached to her, without there being any question of anything more than friendship, and whom she found, in case of need, the most eager to serve her in her affairs. She was at this time in the best and the most aristocratic society, as much as the wife of Pléneuf was able to be; and there she has remained since, among all the vicissitudes which she has experienced.”
Saint-Simon does not exaggerate. Madame de Pléneuf never encountered among her admirers any resistance to the regulations which she imposed upon them. All submitted to them with a good grace; all passed without protest from the rank of candidates for her favour to that of lover, and from that of lover to that of friend, and of friends, in some instances, ready to make considerable sacrifices for her sake.
Among several children, Madame de Pléneuf had a daughter, born in 1698, some two years after the marriage of her parents, to whom she had given her own name of Agnès. Beautiful as was the mother, the daughter promised to be more beautiful still, and with her physical perfections she combined vivacity, intelligence, and the most charming manners. “A figure supple and above the middle height, the air of a nymph, a delicate face, pretty cheeks, a well-formed nose, blonde hair, eyes a trifle small, but bright and expressive; in a word, a physiognomy refined and distinguished, and a voice as charming as her face.” Such is the description given of her, when she was fifteen, by the Président Hénault, and his praises are echoed by practically all contemporary writers. Saint-Simon declares that she was “beautiful, well-made, more charming by reason of those indescribable things which captivate, and with much intelligence carefully cultivated”; Marais admits that there was “much that was agreeable in her countenance, in her mind, and in all her manners”; d’Argenson proclaims her “la fleur des pois”; while in the eyes of Duclos, she “possessed more than beauty,” and “everything about her was seductive.”
Now, while Agnès remained a child, Madame de Pléneuf would appear to have been quite a devoted mother, and “it was the passion and occupation of her life to bring her up well.” But, as the little girl advanced towards womanhood, and gained every day what she herself was losing in attractions, with the result that the homage of some of the gallants who frequented the Hôtel de Pléneuf began to be transferred from the mother to the daughter, the affection which she had once entertained for her gradually changed to dislike, and eventually to the bitterest jealousy and hatred. “In proportion as the daughter pleased by a hundred attractions,” writes Saint-Simon, “she displeased her mother. Madame de Pléneuf could not endure the sight of homage addressed to others than herself at her own house. The advantages of youth irritated her. Her daughter, whom she was unable to prevent from perceiving it, suffered her dependence, endured her murmurs, supported the constraints imposed upon her, but she began to be annoyed by them. Pleasantries concerning the jealousy of her mother escaped her, which were reported to Madame de Pléneuf. The latter felt the ridicule of them. She flew into a passion. The girl retorted, and Pléneuf, more prudent than she was, dreading a scandal which might prejudice the establishment of his daughter in life, decided to provide her with a husband.”
It was certainly high time to separate mother and daughter, for the enmity between them was increasing every day, and at the beginning of 1713 an incident occurred which brought matters to a crisis and made it impossible for them to remain any longer under the same roof.
Among the admirers of Madame de Pléneuf was a certain Comte d’Angennes. Young, handsome, and of charming manners, he had not been permitted to sigh in vain; indeed, the lady appears to have conceived for him a most violent passion. In a surprisingly short time, however, she perceived that the ardour of her new lover was beginning to cool, for, though frequenting the house as assiduously as ever, he no longer sought opportunities of being alone with his hostess. Madame de Pléneuf, her suspicions aroused, watched him closely, and more than once detected him talking in low tones to Agnès, with an expression on his face which there was no mistaking.
Thenceforth the jealous woman’s hatred of her too attractive daughter knew no bounds. No longer did she trouble to dissimulate her feelings from her friends, but actually incited the most devoted of them to imitate the attitude she adopted towards the girl, with the result that poor Agnès’s life became almost unendurable.
Unendurable, too, was the sight of her to her unnatural mother, and she importuned her husband until he consented that the girl should leave the house and be placed in a convent, while awaiting the appearance on the scene of an eligible suitor. Several gentlemen who answered more or less to this description speedily presented themselves, and, after some hesitation, M. de Pléneuf decided in favour of the Marquis de Prie.
The marquis was twenty-five years older than Agnès and, though he was the possessor of large estates, they were either so unproductive or so heavily mortgaged that they brought him in next to nothing. But he was a member of a very ancient House, connected with several of the most illustrious families in France, was governor of Bourbon-Lancy, colonel of the cavalry regiment which bore his name, held the rank of brigadier-general in the Army, and, finally, was one of the godfathers of the heir to the throne.
This last honour, which he owed to his good fortune in happening to be with his aunt the Duchesse de Ventadour, gouvernante to the Duc d’Anjou, in Louis XIV.’s cabinet, at the moment when the infant prince was brought thither for his Majesty’s inspection, seems to have had great weight with M. de Pléneuf, who was intoxicated with the idea of an alliance with the godfather of his future King. As for the marquis, it is probable that M. de Pléneuf’s money-bags constituted a far more potent attraction for him than the beaux yeux of his lovely daughter. He was not only poor, but ambitious, and, now that the approach of peace threatened to put an end to his hopes of military distinction, he had decided to embark upon a diplomatic career, and aspired to an embassy, for which, of course, the possession of a long purse was an indispensable qualification.
The preliminaries were soon concluded, and on 27 December, 1713, Agnès Berthelot de Pléneuf became the Marquise de Prie. Taken to Versailles by the Duchesse de Ventadour, to be presented to Louis XIV., she astonished all the Court by her dazzling beauty and her precocious airs of a woman of the world; and even those who had been inclined to condemn M. de Prie for having contracted a mésalliance were obliged to admit that he had married a wife of whom any man might be proud. Almost immediately after his marriage, the marquis was nominated Ambassador to the King of Sardinia, and set out for Turin, whither, after a short interval, his wife followed him.
At Turin Madame de Prie remained five years. For the first two or three, during which a little daughter was born to her, everything went smoothly. Her husband was kind and attentive, and, if she felt for him no affection and some contempt—for he was a pompous and self-opinionated person, with abilities as slender as his ambitions were lofty—she, at least, tolerated him; while, as the Ambassadress of the greatest King in the world, and one of the most beautiful women in the Piedmontese capital, she was the object of universal homage, and no social gathering was deemed complete which she did not grace with her presence. But towards the end of 1716 an event occurred which was to effect a great change in the fortunes of the Pries.
For some time past a very ugly cloud had been slowly gathering over the head of M. de Pléneuf. At this period, and, indeed, until a very much later date, most gentlemen connected with the commissariat department of the Army were but indifferently honest; but long impunity had rendered Pléneuf unusually audacious, and so outrageously did he rob the Army of Italy, of which he had acted as chief commissary, that in 1706 Louis XIV. ordered an inquiry to be instituted.
Matters would probably have gone hardly with Pléneuf, if he had not had the good fortune to possess powerful protectors. Thanks to their efforts, not only were the charges against him not pressed, but, a little while afterwards, he was actually appointed chief clerk at the War Office.
Nevertheless, his peculations, and those of his colleagues, were not forgotten, and in 1714 the Government decided upon a new revision of the accounts of the Army of Italy. This investigation, temporarily interrupted by the last illness and death of Louis XIV., was resumed some months later, when Philippe d’Orléans, eager to court popularity, determined to make the revenue-farmers and commissaries disgorge their ill-gotten gains; and Pléneuf was the first to be summoned before the Court instituted for that purpose. This time, there was no one to intervene in his favour, and, warned that his arrest was imminent, he fled to Switzerland, and thence made his way to his daughter at Turin.
In saving his person, however, he had not succeeded in saving his property; and his hôtel in Paris and his country-estates were sequestrated until such time as he should make restitution of the immense sums of which he had defrauded the State.
The disgrace and bankruptcy of Pléneuf was a terrible blow to the de Pries. They might have stomached the loss of the old gentleman’s reputation, for the offence of which he had been guilty was of such common occurrence in those days as to be regarded with a very lenient eye, and, indeed, he appears to have received quite a warm welcome at the Court of Turin; but the loss of his money was another matter altogether.
With the laudable desire of upholding the honour of France, both the Ambassador and his wife had incurred heavy expenditure during their residence in Italy; de Prie’s small fortune was entirely exhausted, and very little was left of Agnès’s dowry. It was to the purse of Pléneuf that they had been looking to replenish their empty coffers, and here he was quartered upon them, with a healthy appetite and extravagant tastes, but without a crown in his pocket. In short, the ambassadorial ménage found itself reduced to the direst extremities, and it was only by pawning his plate and borrowing money at usurious interest that the unfortunate representative of the might and majesty of France was able to continue at his post.
Towards the end of the year 1718, matters had reached such a pass that no hope of escaping from his difficulties remained to him save by the intervention of his Government. Again and again he had appealed to Torcy, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, for assistance; but the answer was always the same: the Royal Treasury was empty; it was impossible at present even to pay his Excellency’s salary, much less to discharge his debts.
In despair, the Ambassador determined to send his wife to Paris to plead their cause with the Government, and at the beginning of December Madame de Prie set out for France.
The young woman who returned to Paris was a very different person from the girl who had quitted it five years before. Not only had she gained in outward attractions, but she had gained enormously in worldly knowledge. She had learned the ways of Courts, and had learned them at one where falsehood and dissimulation were considered the first essentials of every good politician. She had learned some of the subtleties of diplomacy, for the Marquis de Prie, who had been no match for Victor Amadeus and his Ministers, had been only too thankful to avail himself of the advice and assistance of his clever wife and father-in-law; indeed, for some months past it was they who had conducted the real work of the embassy. She had learned too to understand the power of her beauty, for, though there would appear to be no reason to believe that she had ever surrendered to love, she had certainly known how to inspire it, and a prince of the Royal House of Savoy—the Prince di Carignano—the Baron Ferron, Prime Minister of Victor Amadeus, the Chevalier de Lozilières, first secretary to the embassy, and the Marquis d’Alincourt, son of the Maréchal de Villeroy, who stayed for some time in Turin on his return from a campaign against the Turks, had been all devoted admirers. “But, above all,” observes her admiring biographer, M. Thirion, “she had learned how to toil, to suffer, to defend herself against the ills of life, to struggle and to combat, in order to satisfy the exigencies of an uncertain hand-to-mouth existence, in such fashion that, beneath the frail envelope of this adorable young body, there beat an almost virile heart, there resided a soul matured before its time, disciplined and for ever superior to cowardly weaknesses.”[255]
And it was a very different Paris to which she returned. The austere and bigoted régime of Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon, where even the most profligate and reckless had been constrained to some semblance of decorum, was no more, and the pent-up impatience of a corrupt society was finding relief in a veritable saturnalia of sensuality. Vice, which for so many years had scarcely dared to rear its head, now stalked abroad, naked and unashamed; virtue, and even ordinary decency, was mocked at and derided. The Regent himself set the tone in moral depravity, and his example was followed by the Princes and Princesses of the Blood, by the bulk of the nobility and by a considerable proportion of the wealthy middle-class.
“The disorderly and foolish life in Paris,” writes the old Duchesse d’Orléans, “becomes every day more detestable and more horrible. Every time it thunders I tremble for this town.”[256]
To send a beautiful and unprotected young woman into the midst of so licentious a Court was, to say the least of it, a very injudicious action on de Prie’s part, and some contemporary writers are of opinion that it was his deliberate intention to launch her upon some gallant adventure. In this, as we shall presently see, they have probably done him an injustice; but, however that may be, nothing in the conduct of his wife during the first months after her arrival in Paris indicates that she had the least idea of speculating in her charms.
Since it was, of course, out of the question for her to demand the hospitality of her detestable mother, she installed herself with her little daughter in a small house close to the Convent of La Conception, belonging to one of her aunts, Madame de Séchelles, to whom she paid an annual rent of 500 livres, for the use of a portion of it. She lived very quietly, for she was almost entirely without resources, and seldom went into Society, though, in accordance with her husband’s instructions, she solicited audiences of the Regent, the Abbé Dubois, Torcy, and, indeed, every one who might be able to be of assistance to the impecunious Ambassador.
The interviews which took place between her detested daughter and these distinguished persons did not escape Madame de Pléneuf, and, thanks to the malevolent activity of her and her friends, a rumour soon began to spread that the young Ambassadress, whose beauty never failed to cause a sensation wherever she appeared, was employing her charms to mend her broken fortunes. She was accused of prostituting herself to the Maréchal de la Feuillade, to d’Alincourt and to Torcy, and of having made an attempt to subjugate the heart of the Regent, who, it was added, had repulsed her, either because she had not pleased him, or because he regarded her as too dangerous a mistress.
There seems to have been no truth whatever in these allegations. La Feuillade was in very bad health; d’Alincourt on the eve of espousing a wealthy heiress, and Torcy approaching his sixtieth year. As for the Regent, well, the post of chief sultana to his Highness was not just then vacant, being occupied by Madame de Parabère; and Madame de Prie was certainly not the kind of woman either to risk the humiliation of a rebuff or to be content with a subordinate position. Moreover, no trustworthy contemporary chronicler has charged the lady with any such ambition as gossip ascribed to her.
If, however, the Regent did not fall in love with Madame de Prie, she seems to have made a very favourable impression upon him, and she was several times invited to assist at those too-celebrated petits soupers at which the ruler of France was accustomed to seek relaxation from the cares of State. However, such orgies were but little to her taste, and when she had at length succeeded in obtaining from him a promise that her husband’s debts at Turin should be settled, or that he should be permitted to resign his post, she ceased to appear at the Palais-Royal.
Meanwhile, the favour with which Madame de Prie was regarded in high places had begun to alarm Madame de Pléneuf and her coterie. Since her daughter’s return to Paris that amiable lady had not ceased to aim at her every kind of shaft that hatred and malice could forge and to incite her docile admirers to do the same. When, however, they saw her a welcome guest at the Palais-Royal, they began to ask themselves if they had not carried their hostility a little too far; and, though Madame de Pléneuf herself professed to be implacable, some of her friends began to make overtures to her daughter, with a view to bringing about a reconciliation. Nothing, however, came of these negotiations, for, before they had proceeded very far, an event occurred which was to fan the dying embers of the old feud into the flame of a new and interminable war.