Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit lived in Paris from 1802 to 1804, at a time when the city was known as the “Capital of the World”. Their home quickly became a highly productive private academy for Germans in France. Among the intellectuals who participated in their lectures, soirées, and publication projects were the Boisserée brothers, the writer Helmina von Hastfer (later Chézy), the physicist Hans Christian Oersted, and the Orientalist Alexander Hamilton.

Many of Schlegel’s note collections from this period have survived. They deal with a variety of disciplines: “On Philosophy”, “On History”, “On Physics”, “On Poetry”, and so on. Schlegel invented his own abbreviation system for his notes, in which π stands for poetry.