"Why, that's the [one] we were looking for! . . . We went so far and he was here all the time." So cried the children in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird when, after searching through heaven, earth and purgatory, they found the bird of happiness right in their own home.
To young Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, who was himself to spend a lifetime looking for the blue bird, home seemed the least likely place on earth in which to look. As a dreamy young lawyer in Belgium's bustling, businesslike city of Ghent back in the 1880s, he longed...
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