de Mérode continued to dance until her early fifties, when she retired to the seaside resort of Biarritz in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département of France. She then taught ballet before retiring in 1965 at 90 years old. In 1950, de Mérode sued Simone de Beauvoir for libel by calling her a courtesan in her book The Second. de Mérode won the lawsuit, and the passage was taken out of the book.
