But now the city of Ghent, where Maeterlinck was born in 1862, is making an impressive effort to create a more coherent picture of their famous son as they celebrate the 100th anniversary of the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature – the only Belgian to ever do so to this day.

In December of 1911, he was awarded the highest literary honour in the world, the Swedish judges said, mainly for The Blue Bird – its “charm and poetic fancy”. The story of two children who travel through space and time in search of the elusive bluebird, it has been translated and performed many times as a play and marionette theatre for audiences around the world. Several film versions also exist, including Flemish director Gust Van den Bergh’s African folkloric Blue Bird, showing now in select cinemas.

The contemporary relevance of Maeterlinck’s work only emerged with the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter where silences – the unspoken – have a dramatic purpose in the development of character and atmosphere. In several of the Maeterlinck’s pieces are meaningful, and sometime sinister, pauses in the dialogue, a device familiar in plays like Pinter’s The Room and The Dumb Waiter.

And action, too, is reduced to a minimum in Maeterlinck’s The Blind where the stage is divided in half, with six old blind men on one side and six blind women on the other. The theme of anxious waiting, so central in more than one of Beckett’s plays, creates much of the tension and suspense in these works created half a century earlier.

One of the first Symbolists, Maeterlinck turned his back on the theatre of eloquence and gesticulation, the realism of his day and, in the words of British theatre historian Eric Bentley, introduced “the nuance, the half-tone, the sigh, the whimper, and the wistfulness”.

It is not a theatrical prescription that has survived outside of a few masterful hands. Other dramatists who came strongly under the Flemish writer’s influence – Yeats, Synge, Wilde, Strindberg and, in the United States, Eugene O’Neill – were able to make use of his materials, to create enduring works from his fragments.

Maeterlinck the man was a complex combination of mystic and martinet. He grew up in Ghent in a well-off bourgeois family, studied law, made only a brief and half-hearted career out of it and might well have done little noteworthy with his life if he had not been propelled to instant fame by a Parisian critic. In his spare time, the disgruntled lawyer wrote poems and a play – Princess Maleine, another of his ethereal heroines. With no prospect of producing it, he published the text himself and gave copies of it to his friends. Somehow, one of them landed on the desk of the theatre critic of Le Figaro in Paris. He read the play by this completely unknown author and the next day told the bemused readers of his paper that he had discovered a masterpiece, adding with a touch of hyperbole that it was “more beautiful than Shakespeare”.

No one could have been more startled at this response than Maeterlinck himself. But he always had an eye for an opportunity and did not hesitate to exploit his sudden celebrity. He soon became the darling of Parisian high society.

Later, it was in Brussels that he met the woman who would make a significant difference in his life, Georgette Leblanc, an actress, singer and dancer, as ambitious as she was glamorous. She took the reclusive playwright in hand and in time inspired some of his best work. Indeed, after more than 20 years, their liaison came to end at least partly because he refused to give her credit for some of the key ideas, she claimed, in one of his philosophical works. He did not deny the charge of virtual plagiarism but thought she should be honoured that he had borrowed her thoughts.

Local boy to the end

By producing a steady flow of books that reached international best-seller status, Maeterlinck became a very wealthy man indeed. He had a taste for palaces and immense mansions in France and, for all his reputed timidity, he had a Hemingwayesque streak. He liked fast cars, motorcycles, swimming, fishing and boxing.

He could be cruel, too. In Leblanc’s biography of him, she tells us that when her cat got on the irritable author’s nerves, he pulled out his revolver and The Nobel laureate was ennobled by Albert I in 1930, the beginning of a stultifying respectability. Count Maeterlinck lived another 19 years before his death in France in 1949. Near the end of his life, he wrote one more book, one unlike any of his others. Bulles Bleues (Blue Bubbles) is his memoir of growing up in Ghent, a fond evocation of Flanders and his family. Urged repeatedly to become a French citizen so that he might be elected to the French Academy, the Fleming who created a new language for the French theatre, lived and died a Belgian.