a Belgian francophone writer born in Antwerp into a modest background but who, becoming an orphan very early, was raised in a French speaking bourgeois family. After studies begun in Belgium and continued in Switzerland, he became a journalist in Brussels, a city in which he lived from 1882, and soon began a career as a novelist. Sensitive to the social condition of the disinherited, he put on the stage the Flemish lower classes – particularly from Campine – subjected to the contempt of the bourgeois. La Nouvelle Carthage (1888) is symptomatic in this respect, describing the inhabitants of a village reduced to misery and forced to emigrate. This realist approach does not exclude the use of an aesthetic which deliberately draws on lyricism. In addition his novel Escal-Vigor (1899) treats openly homosexuality, which earned him an appearance before the Bruges court of assizes in October 1990. He was acquitted, but permanently bruised by this challenge.