Because it celebrates bygone times through the image given of them by “Flemish” painters, Eugene Demolder’s work offers the most complete expression of mythical representations of Belgium. However, itfully enrolls in a literary system which – unlike the onetaking place at that time in Paris – rejects any form of polarization to freely combine naturalist and symbolist inspiration veins. The analysis of the tales collected in Quatuor highlights this phenomenon, and particularly the first of them: La Femme au masque.
 

The article deals with the first of four stories in Eugène Demolder’s Quatuor. The motifs of the mask and hidden identity, mainstays of European culture, in the tale by the Belgian Symbolist writer flirt with the possibility of crossing boundaries in the quest for complete, untrammelled freedom. Presented from the perspective of a young, provincial dandy, the romantic game between a “rebellious” artist and a bewitching, masked stranger turns out to be a battle of wills between a shy, lovelorn seamstress
(a working class woman) and a bourgeois incapable of transcending his class prejudices. The references to Flemish mystics and alchemy scattered throughout the text imply that the protagonist might possibly experience a spiritual transformation if he takes a chance and “crosses boundaries”, but the denouement suggests his utter failure in this regard.
 

In the XIXth century, a legendary aura surrounded the mastership of Dutch artisans. In 1878 Henry Havard published his history of Delft faience, Histoire de la faïence de Delft, considered to be first rigorous elaboration on this matter. Havard carefully studies an ambiguous beginning of the ceramic industry in city of Delft. He attributes the establishing initiative to Herman Pietersz, who was a local plateelbacker, that is an earthenware manufacturer. Almost twenty years later Eugène Demolder published his Quatuor (1897), a set of four fictional tales. In one of them, titled La Fortune de Pieter de Delft, Demolder makes a fictional hero – Pieter de Delft – the founding father of Delft pottery. The hero is plateelschilder, a painter of pottery, who one Sunday, inspired by snow, “in the bliss of mind and aroma of savoury victuals,” full of Schiedam’s jenever creates the fancy artwork. After introduction, the paper suggests reviewing the tale La Fortune de Pieter de Delft using the alchemical key in order to describe the type of perception that the hero is equipped with: “imaginal vision” (regard imaginal, Paolo Mottana).
 

In the short story La Sainte-Anne de Ploubazlanec two subjects dominate : the fantastic and art. The real world and the world of mystic and macabre dreams alternate in descriptions of Breton landscapes. However, its painting-like style and numerous references to art prove that E. Demolder was an excellent art critic.
 

In the story Légende de Seppê-Kaas au jour des Morts by Eugène Demolder every element is doubled. First of all, it concerns the composition, that is, the temporal and spatial structure of the text: the location, Belgium, i.e. the North versus Italy, i.e. the South; the time: present and retrospective past, the narrator: hetero- and homodiegetic. Next, there are the elements of diegesis, which define the narrative dynamics, as well as the symbolic imaginary stratum: ascetic minimalism and erotic freedom, darkness and light, naturalistic literariness and symbolic ambiguity. Cohesion is provided by the ubiquitous image of death: it is death that determines both the sense of current events and the significance of the scenes generated by memories, or, possibly, illusions of the eponymous protagonist-narrator.