In the following year, 1803, she published Delphine, a tale written in five parts and in the form of letters, after the pattern of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_. It is easy to trace the personal impressions and reminiscences which form the groundwork of this novel. The story is the story of a woman's dutiful renunciation of a happy marriage, and for this the authoress's own refusal of Montmorency supplied a background of fact. But the real theme of the book is the loving woman's conflict with society, and the cruel, cold destruction by society of the happiness of the individual. Looking at it in this light, we feel that it was the fresh impressions of her later years, her relations with her husband and Benjamin Constant, that gave the book its tone. Her reputation had been injured by her separation from her husband, her relations with Constant were no secret, and he was undoubtedly the father of her daughter Albertine, born in 1797, the future Duchesse de Broglie. When Mme. de Staël wrote _Delphine_ it had never occurred to her to doubt that Constant would legitimise this daughter by a speedy marriage; but, in spite of the great allowance always made by public opinion for people of wealth and position, and her consequent comparative independence of action, she bitterly felt both the covert persecution of slander and the deliberate attempts at defamation made by the pharisaical. The spiritless, resigned motto of _Delphine_: "A man should be able to defy public opinion, a woman to submit to it," almost betrays its authoress, Madame de Staël's mother. The actual story harmonises with the motto, but the spirit of the book and the very fact of its publication contradict it. For the book is a justification of divorce, and it appeared in the same year that Napoleon concluded the Concordat with the Pope; it attacked indissoluble wedlock and the religious sacrament of marriage, at the very moment when the marriage laws were being made more stringent, and a portion of its old power was being restored to the Church.