Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck was born in Ghent in 1862 into a wealthy, French-speaking Flemish family. Educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Sainte-Barbe, where he acquired a lasting distrust of organised religion, he took a law degree at Ghent in 1885 and then spent some months in Paris, where he met the Symbolists, above all Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose influence on him was decisive.

Fame arrived overnight in 1890, when Octave Mirbeau extolled Princess Maleine in Le Figaro. In The Intruder, The Blind and Pelléas and Mélisande (1892), Maeterlinck created a static drama of spare, incantatory dialogue in which characters wait, half-comprehending, at the threshold of death; Debussy turned Pelléas into an opera, and critics have seen in these plays an anticipation of Beckett and Pinter. With the singer Georgette Leblanc, his companion for some two decades, he lived in Paris, at Grasse and at the abbey of Saint-Wandrille in Normandy, and wrote meditative essays such as The Treasure of the Humble (1896) and The Life of the Bee (1901). The fairy play The Blue Bird (1908), staged by Stanislavsky in Moscow, became his greatest popular success.

The Nobel Prize of 1911 honoured the many sides of his work, especially the plays. His inventiveness waned afterwards, and in 1926 The Life of the Termite drew a credible charge of plagiarism from the South African naturalist Eugène Marais. Granted the title of count in 1932, he fled to the United States in 1940, returned after the war to Orlamonde, his house in Nice, and died there in May 1949. His standing rests above all on the dramas of his youth.