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.