a Belgian francophone writer – his real name being Frédéric Van Ermengem – who was born and died in Brussels. He has remained one of the major representatives of Belgian literature of the fantastic, as is witnessed by his novel, Mélusine (1920), inspired by a Medieval legend in which a character is condemned to metamorphose each Saturday into a woman-snake: here though, in a strange garden devoid of any vegetation, readers discover themselves in the presence of a naiad whose ‘yellow and glowing body is composed of heavy coins with cemented joints.’ But besides these works where dreamlike impressions predominate, close to Dadaism and Futurist currents, Hellens was also a defender of Belgian literature in the French language, notably through the journal Le Disque Vert which he founded in 1922 and which never departed from a great eclecticism. And it is not his slightest merit having discovered the poet Henri Michaux.