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The two-storey white-brick home at 8889 Rue De Tilly, in Laval, Que., is in many ways a metaphor for the life and times of Julie Couillard.

Wedged into a modest lot in a working-class neighbourhood, on a winding road lined with unkempt gardens, dandelions and rusted four-door sedans, Ms. Couillard's home looks out of place: Its front lawn is meticulously manicured, its elegant patio furniture, arranged with military precision, surrounds an in-ground pool in the backyard.

But thick curtains block any view inside.

After weeks in the spotlight, Ms. Couillard remains little more than a shadow. Is she more an opportunist or self-made woman? More a former biker chick or sophisticated real-estate agent? More a tough manipulator or poised entrepreneur? To this day, Maurice (Mom) Boucher, the former Hells Angels leader serving life for murder, believes she was a paid police informant.

In 1996, Ms. Couillard filed a complaint to the Quebec Police Ethics Commission about her arrest by a provincial anti-biker squad, whose members had burst into her bedroom and handcuffed her during the arrest of her boyfriend.

Whatever her real life story, Ms. Couillard is a survivor. She clawed her way up from humble roots into the inner circles of power in Ottawa as the companion to the former foreign affairs minister, Maxime Bernier. Disclosures about classified documents being left behind by her companion have been a source of acute embarrassment to the Harper government.

Former aides to Mr. Bernier suggest Ms. Couillard had ambitions of her own, and seemed interested in helping shape the former minister's public image.

Nowadays, in the aftermath of Mr. Bernier's fall from grace, the woman dubbed the Mata Hari of the 450 – the area code in Laval, a suburb best known for mega-malls and endless housing subdivisions – is busy shaping her own image.

She has come a long way from the small apartment in a crumbling semi-detached home where she once lived with her family. By her own admission, hers was not an easy childhood.

Little is known about the years Ms. Couillard spent as a teenager in Ville-Émard. Long-time residents of the Montreal neighbourhood described her as a polite high-school student whose brother regularly played road hockey in the sugar-maple-lined streets.

None of the neighbours remember Ms. Couillard's parents or what they did for a living. Her father, Marcel, whom Ms. Couillard described as an absentee parent, has a conviction for drug possession. (In 1998, he was charged under the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act with producing and trafficking marijuana. He pleaded guilty two years later to the production of marijuana, and the trafficking charge was dropped).

In an interview in a Quebec gossip magazine this week, Ms. Couillard refers to herself as a businesswoman. Like much else about her, the claim is murky.

She has been a registered real-estate agent since April of last year, listed with Kevlar Real Estate Investments whose downtown Montreal offices sit on the 19th floor of an upscale building with a marble lobby. But Kevlar denies that she is now or ever was an employee.

In 1999, she failed several times to pay the mortgage on a house that she had bought in 1998 while she was still married to Stéphane Sirois, a biker with a Hells Angels puppet gang who became a witness for the prosecution.

The Laurentian Bank got a court ruling repossessing the house because she owed $103,000. (The bank cited Mr. Sirois as a third party in the case but couldn't find his address since he was in the witness protection program.) Ms. Couillard was also taken to small claims court by the lawyer who handled her divorce, for failing to pay $839 in fees.

Financial bad news dogged her as late as last August, when she re-entered the public stage by accompanying Mr. Bernier to Ottawa when he was sworn in as foreign affairs minister.

On Aug. 9, a judge ordered her to pay $1,210 in overdue legal fees for another law firm whose services she had engaged in a commercial dispute.

Her business ventures seemed troubled as well. In 2004, while she was living with boyfriend Robert Pépin, she registered an agency called Casting Cinq Étoiles, also known as Five Star Casting Canada and Five Star Casting International. It recruited extras for films, television and other media, according to public filings.

The company never produced annual reports and was declared officially inactive in December, 2006, a few months before she met Mr. Bernier.

Ms. Couillard also worked briefly with Mr. Pépin in his security business. But Mr. Pépin's father, Denis, describes himself as the concern's real president and insists that Ms. Couillard was brought in at his son's request.

“He had fallen head over heels in love with her,” said Denis Pépin, a former investigator in the Montreal police's organized-crime unit. “He wanted her to be near him.”

The elder Mr. Pépin soured on Ms. Couillard. “I was left with a poor impression of her,” Denis Pépin said.

The relationship between Ms. Couillard and Robert Pépin lasted 10 months before ending in 2005. Robert Pépin took his own life last spring while in debt to a Hells Angels loan shark.

In her public persona, Ms. Couillard presents herself as moving in well-heeled circles, however. In her interview with the gossip magazine, 7 Jours, she suggests that dating a cabinet minister was a step down for her, and not especially good for her business.

“Everyone knows it: A minister earns $250,000 a year. What's left after taxes: $125,000, $130,000? I am constantly with businessmen who make a lot of cash. A minister has no money.”

Long before Ms. Couillard ever graced the front pages of newspapers across Canada and Europe in a plunging décolletage, she was photographed in Quebec's most lurid and bare-all crime tabloid, Allô Police.

“Arrested in the bedroom! The spouse of the mobster Gilles Giguère. … The actress Julie Couillard condemns the Wolverine!”

Ms. Couillard is described in the article as an aspiring actress and model.

In fact, that was also the job title she used in 2002 when she bought a work permit from the Quebec's actors' union, the Union des Artistes, to work at scale.

Perhaps the most striking theme in her life, however, is that the men she comes in contact with seem to meet unpleasant ends.

In the late 1990s, she was living with Gilles Giguère, whom the police suspected of being involved in a loan-sharking affair. On Dec. 18, 1995, the Wolverine police squad took the couple into custody. According to her account in Allô Police, she was taken to the provincial police headquarters and questioned for a day.

Mr. Giguère and two other men with ties to the Hells Angels were charged in connection with an extortion case. Ms. Couillard was released and wasn't charged.

By February of 1996, the case against Mr. Giguère collapsed for lack of evidence. But he was also facing another criminal trial for possession of four submachine guns and 70 pounds of hashish.

The week before the trial was to start he was found dead in a flooded ditch, shot several times in the head. It was three months before the couple was to marry. Ms. Couillard says Mr. Giguère was the one true love of her life, and with all the men that followed, “the bar was so high, no man made the grade.”