It is a striking situation. In the heyday of his glory Sardou never devised anything more theatrically effective--setting aside consideration of the psychologic imbroglio. Vanna then claims Prinzevalle as her spoils of war. To the victor belongs the vanquished. Colonna, despite Prinzevalle's assertion that Vanna's lie is another lie, is handed over to the care of Vanna's people. In a swift "aside" she commands silence. She loves him, she whispers. Marco understands--understands the manner in which Vanna will be revenged upon Prinzevalle and also upon her husband for his disbelief. The latter now disclaims his former doubts. Let her work her vengeance upon the man she has captured. But for her all that has gone before in her entire life is as a bad dream. The real, the beautiful life, the dream, is at hand. It will be her revenge. She must go at once to her prisoner, to Prinzevalle in his cell--the curtain falls. There are weak spots in the scheme which tax one's credulity. Something of the improbable must be granted a dramatist be he never so logical. The rapid mental change of Vanna hints at a nature naturally casuistical, as were no doubt many Italians of the Renascence. Her love for Colonna could never have been deep-rooted. But she did not betray him, and yet she has been adjudged profoundly immoral--in a word, not to put too fine an edge upon the sophistries of the situation, this heroine committed an imaginative infidelity as well as telling a falsehood. The madness of the finale is but the logical outcome of her love for Prinzevalle. Few plays, however, reveal their complete essence in the mere reading. And the cryptic stammering, the arrested spasms, of Maeterlinck's earlier style vanish quite in the action of Monna Vanna. I have dwelt perhaps to lengths upon the spiritual development of the man,--those who run may follow his material progress,--but the reason is simple: the soul of Maeterlinck is in his plays. That he is a creative thinker is not asserted. He has studied deeply the wisdom of the ancients, of the moderns. He knows Emerson and Molière. He knows Saint Teresa and John of the Cross. Conceive an artistic temperament that seeks the phrase for itself as did Walter Pater; that loves the soul of humanity as did Robert Browning; that seeks a dramatic synthesis for his poetry, philosophy, rhetoric--and you have this man. His Flemish _fond_ may account for his mystic temperament, for his preoccupation with things of the spirit, and yet how difficult it is to place the critical finger on this quality and that quality, as if on the bumps of the phrenologist, and say--here is the real Maurice Maeterlinck! VI Passers-by on the Boulevard, the summer of 1903, stared at the Gymnase Theatre, which bore the inscription: Le Théâtre Maeterlinck. Certainly such an institution as the Maeterlinck Theatre was undreamed of a decade ago by the poet's most fanatical adherents.