Voilà cinq ans que Hugues Viane est veuf. Voilà cinq ans qu’il est venu s’installer à Bruges, cette ville qui lui renvoie son image : triste et grise.

Au cours d’une de ses promenades nocturnes, il croise sa morte ou, tout au moins, une femme qui lui ressemble.
Mais alors qu’il la suit, elle disparait à un carrefour.
La retrouvera-t-il ? Est-elle vraiment telle que celle qu’il a perdue autrefois et qu’il pleure encore ?
Bruges demeurera-t-elle cette ville morte?

(par Ezwa)

Bruges-la-Morte is a short novel by the Belgian author Georges Rodenbach, first published in 1892. The title is difficult to translate but might be rendered as The Dead City of Bruges. It tells the story of Hugues Viane, a widower overcome with grief, who takes refuge in Bruges, where he becomes obsessed with a dancer he sees at the opera Robert le diable who is the exact likeness of his dead wife. The book is notable for its poetic evocation of the decaying city and for its innovative form. In 1920, the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold used the novel as the basis for his opera Die Tote Stadt.

Rodenbach interspersed his text with dozens of black-and-white photographs of Bruges. As such, the novel influenced many later writers, including W.G. Sebald. The plot of the book may also have influenced the French crime novel D’entre les morts (The Living and the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Vertigo in 1958.