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.