This is the first English translation of one of Georges Rodenbach's most important prose works by the highly acclaimed translator Mike Mitchell. This long nouvelle is supplemented by shorter pieces from the collection Le Rouet des brumes, briefs episodes of love and death in characteristically atmospheric settings. Hans Cadznad's father dies when he is an infant and he becomes the centre of his mother's life. As he grows up from a pretty child to a serious young man with deep religious convictions, she hopes she will remain in the centre of his life. She sees his desire to enter holy orders as a threat to their life together and tries to keep him near by marrying him off to the daughter of her close friend. This plan founders on the rock of his ?vocation', but then Mevr. Cadez engages the beautiful and experienced Ursula as housemaid. AUTHOR: Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) was born in Tournai, spending most of his time in Ghent and later Paris. He was a typical artist of the decadent period, unfailingly anti-bourgeois and solitary, an aesthete suffering an undisclosed malady of the spirit, a palpable ennui or spleen. Rodenbach, although primarily a poet, is best remembered today for his two novels which are both set in Bruges: Bruges-la-Morte (1892) and The Bells of Bruges (1897) and both translated for Dedalus by Mike Mitchell.
