Guérin, Georges-Pierre-Maurice de

GUÉRIN, GEORGES-PIERRE-MAURICE de. - Poet, b. 5 Aug. 1810 in the castle of Cayla (Languedoc), d. there 19 July 1839. After solitary childhood years, comforted by his love of nature and by his communion with his sister Eugénie, he was set on the ecclesiastical career at the Seminary of Toulouse, but he did not last there. In Paris his literary tendencies revealed themselves ever more clearly, but an excessive sensibility not ordered within a character made of him a tormented man and an artist who rarely attained fullness of expression.

Having drawn close to Lamennais, he was part of the group of « L'avenir », attempting to calm his restlessness in the ideal of religious renewal; but he broke away from the master after the stay at La Chênaie (Brittany) in 1832, and passed through a more violent crisis that ended with the friendship of Barbey d'Aurevilly and the composition of the poem Le Centaure, published posthumously by George Sand in 1840. In it Macareus recounts to Melampus his life, in which youth, exulting in vitality, yearns for union with nature; maturity finds its balance in wisdom and meditation, old age awaits the return into the great whole. Art in it often resolves itself into music, passing from Romanticism to Symbolism and to Decadentism.

After writing the obscure and unfinished Bacchante and entrusting to the Journal his spiritual autobiography, he died in the bosom of the Church, with which he had never had definite relations, also because of the impossibility of reconciling his pantheistic tendencies with the Christian transcendental conception.

Maria Luisa Rondini