The construction of free
Banach-Lie algebra over a normed space enables us to build a connected separable
Banach-Lie group of which any other connected separable Banach-Lie group is
a quotient. New proofs are given to the result on representability of any
Banach-Lie algebra as a quotient of an enlargable Banach-Lie algebra (due to
van Est and Świerczkowski) and to the result on representability of any
topological group as a quotient of a group with no small subgroups (due to
successive efforts of Morris and Thompson, the author, and Sipacheva and
Uspenskiĭ).