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.