SOURCE: “‘Les Roses, Mademoiselle’: The Universe of Michel de Ghelderode,” in American Scholar, Vol. 63, No. 3, Summer 1994, pp. 403-19.

In the following essay, Fox provides a personal reminiscence of Ghelderode's life and career.

“Come preferably at five o'clock,” Michel de Ghelderode had written to me. “The light changes then.” And so it was late in the afternoon when I left the Brussels apartment where I was living in July 1961 to make my first visit to the renowned Belgian playwright, poet, storyteller, and writer of letters. My taxi moved swiftly down fashionable Avenue Louise, past the baroque Palace of Justice, and through the Place Royale of government ministries and the Société Générale, toward 71, rue Lefrancq, the house in Schaarbeek, a working-class district of Brussels, where Ghelderode and his wife Jeanne resided. As my cab proceeded along the Chaussée de Haecht, the domed basilica of the Eglise...