Mérode retired in 1924 to the seaside resort of Biarritz in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département of France. She also spent time at the Château de Rastignac with the Lauwick family. At the request of theater director Henri Varna, she reappeared on stage at the Alcazar in June 1934 in La revue 1900 alongside the dancer George Skibine. de Mérode later reflected, “I was wearing a pink satin dress, boned at the waist, very long, with a ruching at the bottom. We danced five waltzes in a row; we ended with a big whirlwind, and Skibine carried me in his arms to the back of the stage.” She then taught ballet before retiring in 1965 at 90 years old. As a hobby, she crafted figurines of dancers, shepherds, and shepherdesses in the classical style which she then sold. In 1923, de Mérode unsuccessfully sued the owners of the film Peacock Alley (1922) for 100,000 francs in damages, alleging that the film injured her reputation by burlesquing incidents in her career. In 1950, de Mérode sued Simone de Beauvoir for libel, claiming five million francs in damages. de Beauvoir had 'wrongly described her as a prostitute who came from peasant stock and had taken an aristocratic sounding stage name as self promotion' in her book The Second Sex. de Mérode won the lawsuit, and the passage was taken out of the book. However, de Mérode only received one franc in damages because "the judge found that Cléo had permitted the rumors during the course of her career for their publicity value". In 1955, she published her autobiography, Le Ballet de ma vie (The Dance of My Life). In 1964, de Mérode was photographed by Cecil Beaton and featured in the 15 February 1964 issue of Vogue. De Mérode never married or had children, which has led some biographers to categorize her as a lesbian. Paul Klee, who personally knew de Mérode, called her "probably the most beautiful woman alive" and said she "seemed asexual" in a 1902 diary entry. The French novelist Félicien Champsaur reportedly became obsessed with de Mérode and proposed marriage to her multiple times. In her autobiography La ballet de ma vie, de Mérode claimed that she had only been involved with two men in her life. She was engaged to a French aristocrat for nearly ten years before he died of Typhoid fever in 1904, and she was the