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.