She shed floods of tears over her royal companion to whom she owed so much happiness, and whose Queen she might have been but for a miscalculation on the part of her uncle, the Cardinal. Well might she weep, for with the passing of Charles the dam that she had so successfully erected against misfortune burst. It is true that James II. continued to her the pension his brother had allowed her; but his reign was short, and his successor, the cold William of Orange, had other uses for his money than the pensioning of beautiful exiles. Moreover, the Restoration was over; public opinion had changed; it was a disgrace to have been connected with the Stuart Court. The very people who had once welcomed the Duchesse de Mazarin as a possible and popular King's mistress in place of the hated Duchess of Portsmouth now clamoured that she should be packed out of the country. Nothing could have been more disastrous for her than an order of banishment; it meant the choice between sordid poverty in Amsterdam or Brussels, or submission to her persecuting husband and imprisonment in France. What a fate for one who had queened it for fifteen joyous years at Whitehall! Fortunately, yet strangely, her enormous debts saved her from this degradation. Her creditors noisily protested against her expulsion, which would have meant to them a total loss, and they interceded with the new King in her favour. William finally granted her a pension of two thousand pounds and his protection.
For the next ten years, tormented by her creditors, whose prisoner now she virtually was, and persecuted by her husband, who brought a suit to deprive her for ever of any claim to her uncle's fortune, the Duchesse de Mazarin led a feverish life. "In the daytime," says Forneron, "she might be seen searching for Oriental curiosities in the ships that had freshly arrived from India. At Newmarket, she was up and out on horseback at five in the morning. On racing days there were the excitements of betting and of being jostled in the crowd on the course. In the evening there was the theatre. After the play came the oyster supper and then basset. Bacchus consoled her as she descended towards the grave." Occasionally her sisters and children visited her, and St. Evremond and a little court of admirers were ever in attendance. But her day was over, and the shadows of the everlasting night had begun to fall on her. In the summer of 1699, in her fifty-third year, her health failed rapidly; death had no terrors for her, she met it with indifference. The end to this turbulent life came at Chelsea, then a riverside village, whither she had gone for a change of air. Her sister, the Duchesse de Bouillon and her son, the Duc de la Meilleraye, had come over a few days before from Paris, and were with her at the last. St. Evremond, her constant friend for twenty-five years, was inconsolable; the famous wit followed her four years later at the age of ninety, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
But even in death the adventures of the Duchesse de Mazarin were not finished; the corpse of the notorious beauty could not get buried. It was seized by her creditors, who wrangled and haggled over it with her husband, whom the news of her death overwhelmed with a late remorse. He was obliged to pay her debts in full before her body was suffered to leave the country. But even when he finally got possession of it he did not bury it. This strange, half-mad old man, who had so often compelled his wife when alive to accompany him on his interminable wanderings, once more set out with her when dead. "For over a year," says Saint Simon, "M. de Mazarin, who had been so long separated from her, carried her body about with him from one estate to another. Once he suffered it to rest for a short time in the church of Notre Dame de Liesse, where the peasants treated it as that of a saint and touched it with their beads. At last he took it to Paris and buried it beside her famous uncle, the Cardinal, in the church of the 'Collège des Quatre Nations'"—now the Palais de l'Institut!
The following pasquinade of the day will serve as well as another for her epitaph:—
"Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,
Qui des femmes fut la plus belle!
Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin!
Ses enfants seraient sans chagrin
Si leur père était avec elle;
Ci-dessous gît la Mazarin,