Bruges-la-Morte is a story of an obsession which turns murderous. While it is not entirely wrong to associate the novel with the decadence of the fin-de-siècle, to do so is to some extent misleading. Notwithstanding its final spasm of violence, the emotional palette of Bruges-la-Morte is milder and more attenuated than one finds in the fiction of, say, Huysmans. Its dominant mood is that of melancholy and impotent rumination on the past. Hugues Viane has been widowed, and he transplants himself to Bruges, a city which, dispossessed as a result of the silting up of the channel which connected it to the North Sea of the mercantile energies which once animated it, becomes a sympathetic setting for the acting out of the quasi-religious ceremonies of the widower's extravagant grief. Verhaeren responded to the unusual importance of setting in this book:

Rodenbach sang the praises of Bruges because of all cities in the world he considered it most in tune with his sense of melancholy . . . Bruges is the book's protagonist and nothing better explains the novel or tells us more about the poet himself.

Rodenbach clearly agreed about the importance of setting. The first edition of the novel, published by Marpon and Flammarion, was embellished with 35 photographs of Bruges — largely unpeopled monochrome images which vibrate in sympathy to the strange and desolate mood of the novel. (From a bibliographic point of view, Bruges-la-Morte is important because it was the first novel to be published with photographs as an integral part of the text.)

One evening, in a mood of particularly intense melancholic absorption, Hugues thinks he sees his dead wife walking the streets of Bruges. In fact, it is a dancer, Jane Scott, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dead woman. Hugues makes Jane's acquaintance, and begins a liaison with her. He sets her up in a house in a different part of town from his own, dresses her in his wife's old clothes, and tries through her to taste again the pleasures of his marriage. Of course, he cannot succeed:

He had gone too far. Through wanting to unite the two women, their resemblance had diminished. The delusion was possible so long as they remained far removed from each other, separated by the mist of death. Drawn too close together, the differences appeared.