There are few references made to her son by Lady Mary, except in letters to her husband when she was living abroad, ranging from 1741 to 1752. In a letter from Genoa, in 1741, she regrets having to bring before her husband ‘so disagreeable a subject as our son.’ The son was then anxious to procure a dissolution of his marriage with the laundress, but the laundress was a decent woman, living a blameless life, and she could defy Parliament to pass an Act annulling her marriage, even if the father had been willing to help the son to such purpose, which he was not. The mother was unmotherly severe on the son. ‘Time,’ she writes, ‘has no effect, and it’s impossible to convince him of his true situation.’ The son then passed by an assumed name. The name being mentioned to Lady Mary by a stranger, with reference to the responsibility of the bearer of it, she replied, ‘the person was, to my knowledge, not worth a groat, which was all I thought proper to say on the subject.’ In 1742 this ‘fool of quality’ was now wandering, now tarrying on the Continent, under the name of M. de Durand. In the June of that year his mother encountered him, and passed two days with him at Valence, an ancient city on the Rhone. In various letters to her husband, she speaks of ‘our son’ as altered almost beyond recognition, with beauty gone, a look of age not warranted by his years, and, though submissive, with an increase of the old wildness in his eyes that shocked her, as it suggested some fatal termination. He had grown fat, but was still genteel and agreeably polite. She was charmed with his fluently-expressed French, but she noted a general volubility, yet without enthusiasm, of speech, which inconsiderate people took for wit; and a weakness of understanding and of purpose, exposing him to be led by more resolute spirits. ‘With his head,’ she says, ‘I believe it is possible to make him a monk one day and a Turk three days after.’ Flattering and insinuating, he caught the favour of strangers, ‘but,’ says the not too-indulgent lady, ‘he began to talk to me in the usual silly cant I have so often heard from him, which I shortened by telling him I desired not to be troubled with it; and that the only thing that could give me hopes of good conduct was regularity and truth.’ She credited him with ‘a superficial universal knowledge,’ as the result of what he had seen. His acquaintance with modern languages was undoubted, but she did not believe that he knew Arabic and Hebrew. He promised to proceed to Flanders, and there wait his father’s orders; adding, that he would keep secret the interview with his mother; but M. de Durand ‘rode straight to Montélimart, where he told at the Assembly that he came into this country purely on my orders ... talking much of my kindness to him, and insinuating that he had another name, much more considerable than that he appeared with.’