Le determination to surround herself with admirers still made her a sort of queen of society, some illusions at least must have
been passing from her. The most serious of her many passions, that for Benjamin Constant, was coming, though it had

not yet come, to an end. Her father, whom she unfeignedly

idolised, was not long dead. 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 v