Pursuit of Happiness

"Why, that's the [one] we were looking for! . . . We went so far and he was here all the time." So cried the children in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird when, after searching through heaven, earth and purgatory, they found the bird of happiness right in their own home.

To young Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, who was himself to spend a lifetime looking for the blue bird, home seemed the least likely place on earth in which to look. As a dreamy young lawyer in Belgium's bustling, businesslike city of Ghent back in the 1880s, he longed to get away beyond the city's narrow horizon with its slowly turning windmills. On the margins of his law books, he used to scribble ethereal verse about shining knights and gossamer ladies.

Termite Level. "They are laughing at you," sniffed the senior Maeterlinck when Maurice's first mystical writings found their way into print. "Some of my acquaintances did not recognize me," recalled Maurice, "while my friends gave me their hands with an air of pity." Bitter and hurt, he left his native land and went to Paris. There he soon found kinder friends, produced the brooding, mystical plays and essays (Les Aveugles, Pelleas et Melisande, The Life of the Bee) which made his fame worldwide. Critics praised him. He won the Nobel Prize.

Beautiful Georgette Leblanc, an opera singer who claimed to have fallen in love with his poems when she was only 16, placed her heart at his feet. They set up joint housekeeping and a salon sparkling with the brightest names of the age.

Death and decay loomed large in Maeterlinck's works. "Everywhere," wrote a critic, "Maeterlinck discerned signs of an inevitable decadence of the human race . . . According to him, 2,000 years hence human relations will have declined to the level of life in a termite colony." The insects whose lives he studied for years seemed better off than people. "The ant is far less unhappy," wrote Maeterlinck, "than the very happiest of men."

Romance with Head Cold. When The Blue Bird was produced in Paris, the author's eyes lingered on a lively girl who played the part of "Cold-in-the-Head." He took her home to the ancient Benedictine abbey near Rouen which he had bought as his residence. Eight years later, when Cold-in-the-Head was 27, the 57-year-old poet forsook Georgette and married her. They reconverted a huge gambling casino on a hillside overlooking Nice. There they settled down.

The world heaped honors on Maeterlinck. King Albert of the Belgians made him a count. Hollywood accorded him its highest accolade by starring Shirley Temple in his The Blue Bird. During World War II, Maeterlinck and his wife fled to the U.S. With them came two bluebirds. The Maeterlincks were permitted to land, but the bluebirds were barred because of the danger of psittacosis (parrot fever).

Seven years later, almost unnoticed in the surge of great events, the aging dreamer returned to Nice. He wrote endlessly, tended his bees or simply sat staring out the windows in his study. When heavy rains recently washed out the telephone line that linked his house to the outside world, the poet breathed a sigh of relief. One day last week, when her 86-year-old husband felt suddenly ill, Countess Maeterlinck had to run to neighbors to phone for a doctor. The call was too late.

"All seek happiness and receive only death," Maurice Maeterlinck had written. "Is happiness within it or beyond it?" On his Riviera hillside last week, death --and the answer to his question--came to Maurice Maeterlinck.

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