August 29, 1862

Maurice Maeterlinck (August 29, 1862 to May 6, 1949) was born in Belgium but wrote his novels, plays, and essays in French. He cared about metaphysics, and was a mystic and a fatalist. The Catholic Church forbid Catholics to read his books in 1914, but by then, he had won a Nobel Prize for literature (1911). He was too old to fight in World War I, and during World War II he was in the United States.

The Double Garden (1904) translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos is a series of essays. We quote from the first chapter, "Our Friend the Dog." Maeterlinck here demonstrates his ability to inhabit the world of the other. The story is told by a dog.

... I do not speak of the cat, to whom we are nothing more than a too large and uneatable prey: the ferocious cat, whose sidelong contempt tolerates us only as encumbering parasites in our own homes. She, at least, curses us in her mysterious heart; but all the other...[creatures] live beside us as they might live beside a rock or a tree. They do not love us, do not know us, scarcely notice us.