Note 52 — THE INTRUDER By MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Maeterlinck's fame rests on his poetry and his essays no less than on his plays. L'Intruse, The Intruder, reprinted here, belongs to the early years of his activity as a playwright. It was printed in 1890 in a Belgian periodical, La Wallonie, and was acted for the first time a year later at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art in Paris, at a performance given for the benefit of the poet, Paul Verlaine, and the painter, Paul Gauguin. Maeterlinck, though publishing volumes of essays from time to time, continues to write for the theatre.[52] In 1908 The Blue Bird, dramatizing the quest for Truth, one of the most popular of modern plays, was given for the first time in Moscow, to be followed ten years later by the première in New York of a sequel, The Betrothal, similarly dramatizing the search for Beauty. In 1910 came his translation of Macbeth into French. A year later he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.