Mahony, Patrick: Maurice Maeterlinck/Mystical Dramatist (2nd Ed., 1984, Institute for the Study of Man, Wash., D. C.). This does not replace any of the standard biographies or studies of Maeterlinck’s work, but is an enjoyable supplement to them by an artistically literate and temperamentally sympathetic man who knew Maeterlinck well in the last third or so of his life and can give us close personal views of his important romantic relationships (first with the volatile actress/singer Georgette Leblanc, then with his wife, Renée Dahon), his domestic life, and his enduring occult sensibility.

A couple of Maeterlinck incidentals: Maurice and Georgette spent most of their years together at the home they fashioned out of the disused Benedictine monastery of St. Wandrille. Maeterlinck had a secret agreement with the Benedictines, under which the monastery reverted back to the order upon his departure. (He and Renée Dahon moved to a chateau near Nice.) I gather that St. Wandrille then remained unoccupied for several decades. But after the Allied bombing reduced the monastery at Monte Cassino to ruins in one of the bitterest battles of the WW2 Italian campaign (1944), the monks from that community transferred to St. Wandrille. I don’t know what’s become of the property since. And . . .

With France’s defeat in 1940 and the advent of the Vichy regime, Maurice and Renée removed first to Portugal, then to New York. It’s always given me a petit frisson to think of them ensconced in my immediate West Side neighborhood, at the Esplanade on West End Avenue, then an upscale residence hotel, now an upscale senior living facility.

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NEXT TIME: This isn’t quite firm yet, but in my flight from the topicaI,  I may take a look at Meyerbeer. In any event, it will see the light on Friday, Aug. 23.