Guérin, GEORGES MAURICE DE, a young poet of exceptional genius, was born at the château of Le Cayla in Languedoc, 4th August 1810, and was educated for the church at a Toulouse seminary and the Collège Stanislas, Paris, after which he entered the community gathered together by Lamennais at La Chesnaye in Brittany, but followed his master in his estrangement from Rome and renounced his novitiate in October 1833. He next went to Paris to try journalism, and became a teacher at the Collège Stanislas, but married a rich Creole lady in November 1838, and entered on a new life of rest and happiness, which was cut short by his untimely death of consumption, 19th July 1839. An article by George Sand in the Revue des Deux Mondes (May 15, 1840) first drew attention to his genius: his Reliquiae, including the Centaur (a kind of prose poem), letters, and poems, were published in 1860, edited by G. S. Trébutien, with a critical notice by Sainte-Beuve. In the words of the latter, 'no French poet or painter has rendered so well the feeling for nature—the feeling not so much for details as for the ensemble and the divine universality, the feeling for the origin of things and the sovereign principle of life.'—EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN, his sister (1805-48), had something of her brother's genius grafted upon a profound and mystical religion, and devoted herself with more than sisterly devotion to his memory. Her own Journals were published in 1861; her Lettres, in 1864. Both were translated into English.
See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi (vol. xii.) and Nouveaux Lundis (vol. iii.); Marelle, Eugénie et Maurice De Guérin (Berlin, 1869); Harriet Parr, M. and E. De Guérin, a Monograph (1870); and Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism (1865).