Charles de Coster

Charles Théodore Henri De Coster was born in Munich on August 20, 1827, where his father, from Ypres, and his mother, from Huy, were in the service of the apostolic nuncio to Bavaria, Count Charles Mercy d'Argenteau, who stood godfather to the boy. The family settled in Brussels in 1831, and his father died a few years later. Schooled by the Jesuits at the Collège Saint-Michel, he went to work at seventeen as a clerk at the Société Générale bank, and in 1847 founded a small literary club, the Société des Joyeux, with friends. At the end of 1850 he left the bank for the Free University of Brussels, where he took a degree in letters and the democratic, anticlerical convictions that stayed with him for life; his letters from these years to Elisa Spruyt, the woman he loved and lost, were published long after his death. He wrote for Uylenspiegel, the satirical weekly Félicien Rops founded in 1856, and made his name with Légendes flamandes (1858), illustrated by Rops and other friends, and Contes brabançons (1861). From 1860 to 1864 he worked for the Royal Commission publishing the old laws and ordinances of the country. Some ten years of work went into The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak (1867), an epic of Flanders in revolt against Philip II, written in a French modelled on the sixteenth century; it was met with indifference in Belgium and refused the state's five-yearly literary prize. From 1870 he taught at the Royal Military School, though his creditors seized his salary, and Le Voyage de noce followed in 1872. He died in two rented rooms in Ixelles on May 7, 1879, at fifty-one, poor and nearly forgotten. A cheap edition of 1893 found him a new public, Camille Lemonnier called his book the Flemish Bible, and it went on to be translated into every European language.

With his friend the painter Dillens, who kept a collection of old Flemish books in his studio, De Coster made several journeys through Zeeland and Flanders, and the Ulenspiegel took shape on those roads. The manuscript ran past a thousand pages, and he went on rewriting it on the proofs, which left the early editions full of errors.