ABSTRACT
The dichotomy between the considerable number of musical adaptations Maeterlinck's works have undergone and his own confessed, even treasured, deafness to any form of musical expression is confusing: 'Je n'entende rien, mais absolument rien a la musique is a recurrent credo of the writer which would almost justify, far beyond any other considerations, the clash with Debussy occasioned by the latter's Pelleas. By indefinitely enlarging the space of language in the way, by making fixed associations unstable via a vectorised use of words, Maeterlinck manages to reach this 'ineffably general language' that will be found in Proust in the form of the 'ineffable word', both contradictory and unthinkable, that is the 'petite phrase' of Vinteuil. The paradoxical thing is that the Maeterlinckian word is no more a language than music is, in the sense we generally give to the word language.
