The story of Belle van Levert is about the conflict between dreams and reality. Belle, daughter of a textile magnate, hates anything to do with money and power. Most of all she wants to be a poet. She lives with Marthe and has broken with her parents and with wealth. As a result, she has to work for her living and write in the evenings. Her job brings her into conflict with herself. Her character rebels at being a subordinate. She cannot stand having a boss and decides to become one herself. Now reality shatters her dream. She has no time for writing. She postpones poetry, to a future time when no one, not even Marthe, can tell her what to do. This struggle for power becomes an obsession.Later in life, when Belle is blessed with a husband and sons, she discovers she has become the type of person she could never have respected as a child. At crucial moments in her life, she keeps meeting ‘the man’. He takes her to the world which she has passed by, where everything is the product of dreams. The encounter between ‘the man’, who attributes such powers to dreams, and Belle, who sees her dreams come to nothing, does not remain without consequences.
