GUÉRIN, GEORGES-PIERRE-MAURICE de. — Poet, born 5 Aug. 1810 at the Château de Cayla (Languedoc), died there 19 July 1839. After solitary childhood years, sustained by 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 long. In Paris his literary tendencies became ever more evident, yet his unregulated sensibility made him a tormented man and an artist who rarely attained full expressive power.
Drawn to Lamennais, he belonged to the group of “L’Avenir,” seeking to calm his restlessness in the ideal of religious renewal; but he parted from his master after his stay at La Chênaie (Brittany) in 1832, and passed through a more violent crisis culminating in 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 to Melampus his life, in which youth exults in vitality and yearns for union with nature, maturity is balanced by wisdom and meditation, and old age awaits return to the great whole. Art often resolves itself here into music, passing from Romanticism to Symbolism and Decadence.
After writing the obscure and unfinished Bacchante and entrusting his spiritual autobiography to the Journal, he died in the bosom of the Church, toward which he had never maintained definite relations, also because of his inability to reconcile his pantheistic tendencies with the Christian transcendental conception.