The Letter-Journal of Eugénie de Guérin and its Sources of Inspiration

Abstract

Eugénie de Guérin was born in 1805 and died in 1848 in the isolated Château du Cayla in the department of the Tarn, in South West France. She was the first girl in a family of four children. Having lost her mother at the age of fourteen years, she was given responsibility for the upbringing of her younger brother, Maurice. She later refused three or even four proposals of marriage, so determined was she to keep her promise to her dying mother that she would care for Maurice and for the whole family. At the age of twenty-nine years, separated from her brother, who was living in Paris, and anxious about his spiritual welfare, she began writing a series of long and secret letters to him to guide him in his religious walk. At the same time as she was sending him secret letters via his friends, she was also sending him more public ones to be read out aloud to the cousins with whom he was lodging. Extracts from these intimate letters, entitled Reliquiae were published in France in 1855, seven years after her death. The publication met with tremendous success, possibly due to the rather unusual distribution of the limited number of fifty copies of the Reliquiae. These were given or sent to extremely well-known contemporary writers, such as Baudelaire, in the hope that this would lead to a great demand for the later publication of the whole journal. Indeed, such expectations were well met, for twelve out of a maximum of sixteen of her letter-booklets were published as the Journal d’Eugénie de Guérin in 1862 by G.S. Trébutien and Jules Barbey d ’ Aurevilly and reached eight editions only sixteen months after publication. By 1866, four years later, there were twelve editions, thirty by 1877, fifty-nine by 1929, but as her popularity slowed down, only 60 by 1977 and 61 by 2001.