A Belgian francophone writer, born in Tournai and who died in Paris, after having lived successively in Ghent and Brussels. This descendant of a great French speaking Flemish bourgeois lineage, the holder of a law degree gained at the University of Ghent, distinguished himself in several literary genres: poetry, theatre and the novel. But, besides his contributions to La Jeune Belgique, which brought together supporters of ‘an art for arts sake’ ethic, it is his novel Bruges-la-Morte – first appearing as a series in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro in February 1892 – which made him famous. This work, swimming in fog, rain and wind and in which chime the bells of the dulled Flemish town, and affected by the pessimistic philosophy of a Schopenhauer, relates the passion of a widower for a women who strangely resembles his wife. But nonetheless it is the historical town named ‘the Venice of the North’ which is the real character of this book with symbolist resonances, an inspirational town reduced to a shadow of itself at the moment Rodenbach painted it.