A Belgian francophone writer born in Munich to a Walloon mother and a Flemish father who held the functions of a steward of the Bavarian city’s Apostolic Nuncio. Having arrived very young in Belgium, he studied humanities at the Brussels Collège Saint-Michel, and then began studies at the capital’s Free University, without nevertheless ever completing them. But it was within this institution that he was taken by the spirit of the free exam, which would lead him to adopt democratic and anti-clerical convictions. He then became a journalist and a Professor of the Brussels ‘École de guerre’. His Légendes flamandes (1857) knew a certain success. The same would not be true of his Contes brabançons (1861), and even less so for his La Légende et les Aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses d'Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandres et ailleurs (1867), which remains known under its abridged title La Légende d'Ulenspiegel: this novel, written in a deliberately archaic language, and mixing history and myth, places on the stage Thyl Ulenspiegel (or Till the Mischievous), a symbol of the resistance to the oppression of King Philippe II and the Duke of Alba during the time of the Spanish Netherlands in the 16th century. The fact remains that, coldly welcomed by non-conformist backgrounds, this magnum opus new universal success after the death of its author and is generally considered as foundational in Belgian literature of French expression.