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GUÉRIN, MAURICE DE—GUERNSEY
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situation of the émigrés. Guérin on this occasion was publicly crowned by the president of the Institute, and before his departure for Rome (on the re-establishment of the École under Suvée) a banquet was given to him by the most distinguished artists of Paris. In 1800, unable to remain in Rome on account of his health, he went to Naples, where he painted the “Grave of Amyntas.” In 1802 Guérin produced “Phaedra and Hippolytus” (Louvre); in 1810, after his return to Paris, he again achieved a great success with “Andromache and Pyrrhus” (Louvre); and in the same year also exhibited “Cephalus and Aurora” (Collection Sommariva) and “Bonaparte and the Rebels of Cairo” (Versailles). The Restoration brought to Guérin fresh honours; he had received from the first consul in 1803 the cross of the Legion of Honour, and in 1815 Louis XVIII. named him Academician. The success of Guérin’s “Hippolytus” of “Andromache,” of “Phaedra” and of “Clytaemnestra” (Louvre) had been ensured by the skilful selection of highly melodramatic situations, treated with the strained and pompous dignity proper to the art of the first empire; in “Aeneas relating to Dido the disasters of Troy” (Louvre), which appeared side by side with “Clytaemnestra” at the Salon of 1817, the influence of the Restoration is plainly to be traced. In this work Guérin sought to captivate the public by an appeal to those sensuous charms which he had previously rejected, and by the introduction of picturesque elements of interest. But with this work Guérin’s public successes came to a close. He was, indeed, commissioned to paint for the Madeleine a scene from the history of St Louis, but his health prevented him from accomplishing what he had begun, and in 1822 he accepted the post of director of the École de Rome, which in 1816 he had refused. On returning to Paris in 1828, Guérin, who had previously been made chevalier of the order of St Michel, was ennobled. He now attempted to complete “Pyrrhus and Priam,” a work which he had begun at Rome, but in vain; his health had finally broken down, and in the hope of improvement he returned to Italy with Horace Vernet. Shortly after his arrival at Rome Baron Guérin died, on the 6th of July 1833, and was buried in the church of La Trinità de’ Monti by the side of Claude Lorraine.

A careful analysis and criticism of his principal works will be found in Meyer’s Geschichte der französischen Malerei.


GUÉRIN DU CAYLA, GEORGES MAURICE DE (1810–1839), French poet, descended from a noble but poor family, was born at the chateau of Le Cayla in Languedoc, on the 4th of August 1810. He was educated for the church at a religious seminary at Toulouse, and then at the Collège Stanislas, Paris, after which he entered the society at La Chesnaye in Brittany, founded by Lamennais. It was only after great hesitation, and without being satisfied as to his religious vocation, that under the influence of Lamennais he joined the new religious order in the autumn of 1832; and when, in September of the next year, Lamennais, who had come under the displeasure of Rome, severed connexion with the society, Maurice de Guérin soon followed his example. Early in the following year he went to Paris, where he was for a short time a teacher at the College Stanislas. In November 1838 he married a Creole lady of some fortune; but a few months afterwards he was attacked by consumption and died on the 19th of July 1839. In the Revue des deux mondes for May 15th, 1840, there appeared a notice of Maurice de Guérin by George Sand, to which she added two fragments of his writings—one a composition in prose entitled the Centaur, and the other a short poem. His Reliquiae (2 vols., 1861), including the Centaur, his journal, a number of his letters and several poems, was edited by G. S. Trébutien, and accompanied with a biographical and critical notice by Sainte-Beuve; a new edition, with the title Journal, lettres et poèmes, followed in 1862; and an English translation of it was published at New York in 1867. Though he was essentially a poet, his prose is more striking and original than his poetry. Its peculiar and unique charm arises from his strong and absorbing passion for nature, a passion whose intensity reached almost to adoration and worship, but in which the pagan was more prominent than the moral element. According to Sainte-Beuve, “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.”

The name of Eugénie de Guérin (1805–1848), the sister of Maurice, cannot be omitted from any notice of him. Her Journals (1861, Eng. trans., 1865) and her Lettres (1864, Eng. trans., 1865) indicated the possession of gifts of as rare an order as those of her brother, though of a somewhat different kind. In her case mysticism assumed a form more strictly religious, and she continued to mourn her brother’s loss of his early Catholic faith. Five years older than he, she cherished a love for him which was blended with a somewhat motherly anxiety. After his death she began the collection and publication of the scattered fragments of his writings. She died, however, on the 31st of May 1848, before her task was completed.

See the notices by George Sand and Sainte-Beuve referred to above; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (vol. xii.) and Nouveaux Lundis (vol. iii.); G. Merlet, Causeries sur les femmes et les livres (Paris, 1865); Selden, L’Esprit des femmes de notre temps (Paris, 1864); Marelle, Eugénie et Maurice de Guérin (Berlin, 1869); Harriet Parr, M. and E. de Guérin, a monograph (London, 1870); and Matthew Arnold’s essays on Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin, in his Essays in Criticism.


GUERNIERI, or Werner, a celebrated mercenary captain who lived about the middle of the 14th century. He was a member of the family of the dukes of Urslingen, and probably a descendant of the dukes of Spoleto. From 1340 to 1343 he was in the service of the citizens of Pisa, but afterwards he collected a troop of adventurers which he called the Great Company, and with which he plundered Tuscany and Lombardy. He then entered the service of Louis I. the Great, king of Hungary and Poland, whom he assisted to obtain possession of Naples; but when dismissed from this service his ravages became more terrible than ever, culminating in the dreadful sack of Anagni in 1358, shortly after which Guernieri disappeared from history. He is said to have worn a breastplate with the inscription, “The enemy of God, of pity and of mercy.”


GUERNSEY (Fr. Guernesey), one of the Channel Islands, belonging to Britain, the second in size and westernmost of the important members of the group. Its chief town, St Peter Port, on the east coast, is in 2° 33′ W., 49° 27′ N., 74 m. S. of Portland Bill on the English coast, and 30 m. from the nearest French coast to the east. The island, roughly triangular in form, is 91/4 m. long from N.E. to S.W. and has an extreme breadth of 51/4 m. and an area of 15,691 acres or 24.5 sq. m. Pop. (1901), 40,446, the density being thus 162 per sq. m.

The surface of the island rises gradually from north to south, and reaches its greatest elevation at Haut Nez (349 ft.) above Point Icart on the south coast. The coast scenery, which forms one of the principal attractions to the numerous summer visitors to the island, is finest on the south. This coast, between Jerbourg and Pleinmont Points, respectively at the south-eastern and south-western corners of the island, is bold, rocky and indented with many exquisite little bays. Of these the most notable are Moulin Huet, Saint’s, and Petit Bot, all in the eastern half of the south coast. The cliffs, however, culminate in the neighbourhood of Pleinmont. Picturesque caves occur at several points, such as the Creux Mahie. On the west coast there is a succession of larger bays—Rocquaine Perelle, Vazon, and Cobo. Off the first lies Lihou Island, the Hanois and other islets, and all three bays are sown with rocks. The coast, however, diminishes in height, until at the north-eastern extremity of the island the land is so low across the Vale or Braye du Val, from shore to shore, that the projection of L’Ancresse is within a few feet of being isolated. The east coast, on which, besides the town and harbour of St Peter Port, is that of St Sampson, presents no physical feature of note. The interior of the island is generally undulating, and gains in beauty from its rich vegetation. Picturesque glens descend upon some of the southern bays (the two converging upon Petit Bot are notable), and the high-banked paths, arched with foliage, which follow the small