GUÉRIN, GEORGES-PIERRE-MAURICE de. – Poet, born on 5 August 1810 at the château of Cayla (Languedoc), died there on 19 July 1839. After the solitary years of his childhood, comforted by his love of nature and communion with his sister Eugénie, he was directed toward an ecclesiastical career at the Seminary of Toulouse, but did not remain there. In Paris, his literary tendencies became increasingly apparent, but his excessive sensitivity, unguided by a formed character, made him a tormented man and an artist who rarely attained expressive fullness.
Having drawn close to Lamennais, he became part of the group of « L'avenir », attempting to calm his restlessness through the ideal of religious renewal; but he broke with the master after his stay at La Chénale (Brittany) in 1832, and underwent a more violent crisis that ended with his friendship with Barbey d'Aurevilly and the composition of the poem Le Centaure, published posthumously by George Sand in 1840. In it, Macareus recounts his life to Melampus: youth, exultant with vitality, yearns for union with nature; maturity finds equilibrium in wisdom and meditation; old age awaits its return to the great whole. Art here often resolves itself into music, passing from Romanticism into Symbolism and Decadentism.
After writing the obscure and unfinished Bacchante and entrusting his spiritual autobiography to the Journal, he died within the Church, toward which he had never maintained clearly defined relations, partly because of the impossibility of reconciling his pantheistic tendencies with the Christian transcendental conception.