Bruges-la-Morte

A braid of a dead woman's golden hair lies under glass in Bruges, and every day the man who loved her comes to it as to an altar. Hugues Viane has chosen this city for his mourning because it is already in mourning: grey canals that hold the sky without moving, bells tolling over the water at every hour, the hushed courtyards of the béguines. One evening in the streets he sees her again, or a dancer with her face, and a grief that had seemed almost holy begins to curdle into something terrible. Rodenbach set photographs of the empty city among his pages, so that Bruges becomes a second widow, a place where every stone confirms what Hugues needs to believe. His sentences move like the canals, slow and gleaming and cold underneath. Korngold turned the book into an opera, and its shadow lies over every story since of a man who tries to dress the living in the clothes of the dead. And all the while the hair waits in its glass case, like a held breath.