In love, Madame de Montbazon was very mercenary; we say it once for all, and beg to be excused from citing proof of the assertion. In politics, she also surrendered herself very willingly to any representation the eloquence of which was aided by crowns or pistoles. It was thus that in the month of August, 1649, she promised that the Duke de Beaufort should not oppose the return of the Court, at the same moment that she opened her hand to receive a considerable sum. It was thus that, the same year, she accepted two thousand pistoles from the Spanish envoys, who, desirous of rendering her favourable, promised besides that the sum of twenty thousand crowns and a pension of six thousand livres if she would secure to them the concurrence of the Duke de Beaufort. But she did not always meet with debtors so honest as Mazarin and the Spanish ambassadors. In 1650, whilst the treaty was preparing which sought to unite the Frondeurs with the Princes, then prisoners at Havre, a negotiation was entered into with Madame de Montbazon in which the Prince de Conti was offered to her as a husband for her daughter. The proposition was not accepted. The proposers were not discouraged, and a sum of a hundred thousand crowns was offered to her. This time the Duchess could not resist, and the treaty was signed in all due form. Unfortunately, when the Princes were liberated, she was imprudent enough to confide her voucher to the Princess Palatine, who, with perfidious haste, had promised to take care of her interests. She never saw the precious contract again, and the Prince de Condé only answered her demands by cruel and cutting jeers. In that adventure, it was not Madame de Montbazon who played the shabbiest part.
The aid which the Duchess had often lent the Court amidst intrigues the most contradictory, did not preserve her from exile when the King made his entry into Paris, on its definite pacification in October, 1652. She did not return thither till 1657. "She was still beautiful, and as much carried away by vanity as though she had been only in her twenty-fifth year," says Madame de Motteville, when noting her reappearance. "She relied all the same upon her charms," she adds with a somewhat malicious finesse, "for she returned with the same desire of pleasing; and those who saw her assured me that the mourning garb which she wore as a widow, and to which she added everything in the shape of ornament that self-love could suggest, rendered her so charming, that in her case it might be said that the course of nature was changed, since so many years and so much beauty could meet together."[5] Thus, by dint of care and art, did Madame de Montbazon succeed in preserving her beauty much longer than she could have hoped for, since, in the pride of her eighteen summers, she declared that old age commenced at thirty, and requested it as a favour that she might be flung into the river and drowned so soon as she reached the dreaded period. Who would have dared to remind her of that imprudent proposal in 1640? And who could have refused her a respite even in the latter moments of her existence?