The General Curve Lemma is a tool of Infinite-Dimensional Analysis that enables refined studies of differentiability properties of maps between real locally convex spaces to be made. In this article, we generalize the General Curve Lemma in two ways. First, we remove the condition of local convexity in the real case. Second, we adapt the lemma to the case of curves in topological vector spaces over ultrametric fields.

We show that every countable direct system of finite-dimensional real or complex Lie groups has a direct limit in the category of Lie groups modelled on locally convex spaces. This enables us to push all basic constructions of finite-dimensional Lie theory to the case of direct limit groups. In particular, we obtain an analogue of Lie's third theorem: every countable-dimensional locally finite real or complex Lie algebra arises as the Lie algebra of some regular Lie group (a suitable direct limit group).

We study the range of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,\alpha }}$ -smooth bump function defined on a Banach space. We find that this set must satisfy two geometrical conditions: It can not be too flat and it satisfies a strong compactness condition with respect to an appropriate distance. These notions are defined precisely below. With these results we illustrate the differences with the case of ${{C}^{1}}$-smooth bump functions. Finally, we give a sufficient condition on a subset of ${{X}^{*}}$ so that it is the set of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,1}}$-smooth bump function. In particular, if $X$ is an infinite dimensional Banach space with a ${{C}^{1,1}}$-smooth bump function, then any convex open bounded subset of ${{X}^{*}}$ containing 0 is the set of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,1}}$-smooth bump function.