A Belgian in Paris

Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach (1855-1898) was a Belgian symbolist poet and novelist.

Born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father, he went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege. Rodenbach worked as a lawyer and journalist, spending the last ten years of his life in Paris as the correspondent of the Journal de Bruxelles.

He published eight collections of verse and four novels, as well as short stories, stage works and criticism. In his best known work, Bruges-la-Morte (1892), he explains that his aim is to evoke the town as a living being, associated with the moods of the spirit, counselling, dissuading from and prompting action.

This is Rodenbach's grave in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris.