Charles van Lerberghe

[2] Their author typified them in a letter to his regular correspondent, fr:Fernand Severin, as "symbolo-humoristico-philosophical stories" and considered them the product of the Flemish side of his imaginative life.

[4] The subject of Les Flaireurs (The Trackers) represents the death of an old peasant woman, who is accompanied only by a child in a remote cottage on a stormy night, as unknown presences batter on the door.

This was the long-lined soliloquy "Solayne", which came punctuated with such prose stage directions as: "While She speaks, the sky gradually dims and clouds resembling dark storm-tossed vessels pass over - and flights of owls."

[12] After reconstructing as far as possible the intended long poem from van Lerberghe's notebooks, Robert Goffin published it in 1939 under the title Solyane, un chef d’oeuvre oublié (a forgotten masterpiece).

In his introduction, Goffin described the poem's similar leaning towards the obscurity and complexity of Stéphane Mallarmé's poetic soliloquies, "Hérodiade" and "L'après-midi d'un faune", and its anticipation of La Jeune Parque, Paul Valéry's Symbolist masterwork in the same form, published a decade after van Lerberghe's death.

[16] The tumbling golden locks about the faces of his Madonnas and Venus, for example, are reproduced in such passages as Round are my mouth, my bosom, and By grape or goblet may be spanned.

[19] Aesthetically, the poet was indebted to Henri Bergson's philosophical theory of duration, whose description of the existential state of impermanence inspired van Lerberghe to cultivate his vision of transient beauty.

"[21] After a liminal "Prelude", the four sections into which the remaining 94 poems are divided are titled "First Words" (Premières paroles), "Temptation" (Tentation), "Transgression" (Faute) and "Twilight" (Crépuscule), through which Eve is followed from her innocent awakening in the Garden of Eden through her growth into mortal consciousness.

[22] Van Lerberghe's approach to the journey of his cosmic and pantheistic Eve is sympathetic and supportive, for by this time he was in reaction to Catholic doctrine and counted himself a disciple of Darwin.

Van Lerberghe's anticlericalism was carried over into the prose of his three-act satirical comedy Pan, published in February 1906 by Mercure de France, which celebrates the triumph of its protagonist's joyous paganism.

[29] Towards the end of van Lerberghe's lifetime, Gabriel Fauré had discovered in his poetry "a kind of Pre-Raphaelite language of feminine beauty and grace" that inspired in the composer the two song cycles that are the great works of his maturity.

[41] In 1911, four years after his death, a stone memorial plaque carved in Art Nouveau capitals was set into the brickwork of the poet's birthplace at what is now 83 Franklin Rooseveltlaan.

[42] And in 1936 the Société des écrivains ardennais erected a carved granite boulder in Bouillon recording that van Lerberghe had composed La Chanson d'Ève in the town.