**He was born in Tournai and went to school in Ghent, where he became friends with the poet Emile Verhaeren. Rodenbach worked as a lawyer and journalist. He spent the last
**ten years of his life in Paris as the correspondent of the ''Journal de Bruxelles'', and was an intimate of Edmond de Goncourt. He published eight collections of verse and four novels, as well as short stories, stage works and criticism. He produced some Parisian and purely imitative work; but a major part of his production is the outcome of a passionate idealism of the quiet Flemish towns in which he had passed his childhood and early youth. In his best known work, ''Bruges-la-Morte'' (1892), he explains that his aim is to evoke
