The conviction must have been for some time forcing itself on her, though she did not even yet give up hope, that Napoleon's resolve not to allow her presence in her still more idolised Paris was unconquerable.

Her husband, who indeed had long been nothing to her, was dead also, and the fancy for replacing him with the boy Rocca had not yet arisen.

The influence of the actual chief of her usual herd of lovers, courtiers, teachers, friends (to use whichever term, or combination of terms, the charitable reader pleases), A.W.
Schlegel, though it never could incline her innately unpoetical and unreligious mind to either poetry or religion, drove her towards aesthetics of one kind and another.

Lastly, the immense intellectual excitement of her visits to Weimar, Berlin, and Italy, added its stimulus to produce a fresh intellectual ferment in her.

On the purely intellectual side the result was _De l'Allemagne_, which does not concern us; on the side of feeling, tinged with aesthetic philosophy, of study of the archaic and the picturesque illuminated by emotion--the result was _Corinne_.
If there had been only one difference between this and its author's earlier attempt at novel-writing, that difference would have given _Corinne_ a great advantage.