Germaine de Staël put the idea in a short story, “The Reasons Why Léontine de Ternan Decided to Become a Nun”:
I was once a very beautiful woman, and I am now fifty years old. These two absolutely ordinary facts have been the cause of everything I have ever felt in life.
(Quoted from “The Great de Staël,” by Richard Holmes. The New York Review of Books, May 28, 2009.)
For a brief biography of Germaine de Staël, click here. For a brief biography of Richard Holmes, click here.
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