Experience of a saddening sort taught me that a man and his works are twain; that a poet never looks like a poet; a composer is seldom harmonious in private life. Yet I could not be but tempted when a brief, courteous note from the author of Monna Vanna informed me that he would give me an evening hour for an informal interview. Maeterlinck lives on the Rue Reynouard in a small house, the garden of which overlooks the Seine from the moderate heights of Passy. To reach his apartments I had to traverse a twisted courtyard, several mysterious staircases built on the corkscrew model, and finally was ushered into an ante-chamber full of screens, old engravings, fans, much ornamental brass, and reproductions of Mantegna, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and other symbolistic painters. But I was not to abide there long. A maid with doubting eyes piloted me across a narrow hallway, through a room where sat a tirewoman altering theatrical costumes--and at last I was not in M. Maeterlinck's presence. Not yet. Down another staircase, and the great man loomed up in cycling costume, cordial, grave, a handsome fellow with big, Flemish bones, a small, round head, and wavy hair dappling at the temples. A man past forty, a gentle, pensive sort of man, Maurice Maeterlinck does not look like his photographs for the reason that they were taken nearly a decade ago. He is much older, much more vigorous, than I pictured him. The general race characteristics are Flemish or Belgian--that is, Germanic and not Gallic. This he knows well and realizes that his work must ever be exotic to the logical mind of the Frenchman, for whom the form is ever paramount to the idea. Maeterlinck's eyes are what the French call flowers of the head. A gray blue, with hints of green, they are melancholy eyes, these, with long, dark lashes. He is extremely modest, even diffident, though touch him on his favourite theme and he responds readily. A devourer of English literature, he will not venture into conversation in our tongue, for he has had little practice. German he speaks, and he knows Italian. He told me that in composing Monna Vanna, he read Sismondi for a year so as to get historical colour. He was quite frank about the conception of this play. "I wrote it for Mme. Maeterlinck," he remarked simply, which disposed of my theory that the piece was written to prove he knew how to make a drama on conventional lines. Joyzelle was also written for the same actress, a woman who has played an important rôle in the poet's life. Then I brought up Browning's Luria and the opinion of Professor Phelps of Yale that Maeterlinck had profited by reading the English poet when he composed Monna Vanna. M. Maeterlinck smiled.