When the Flemish author Maurice Gilliams died at the age of 82, he had yet to complete Gregoria, a work he’d started forty-five years earlier. Half a lifetime was not enough to complete a novel about this dark period of his life. The story is partly about a time that should bring happiness to every lover: the honeymoon period. For Gilliams, however, both the wedding day and the traditional wedding trip that followed was a nightmare. The engagement period foretold little that was good: hysteria and frigidity characterized the girl of his dreams. She scarcely allowed him to touch her, while he was over-sensitive and weak willed. He wrote poetry. How it all ended in marriage is described in hallucinatory fashion in Gregoria.