DiotimosReading Desk

Faith and spiritual life

Hope and despair

espérance; espoir; espérer; désespoir; désespérer

Espérance and espoir can designate religious trust, an anticipated future, or the smallest surviving possibility of relief.

From the book

The Green Notebook

Maurice de Guérin · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Browse this book’s lexicon →

Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordEspérance and espoir can designate religious trust, an anticipated future, or the smallest surviving possibility of relief.
  • In GuérinAfter the conversation about social duty in March 1833, contentment is identified as the expression of hope: recovery is anticipated before it is achieved.
  • In this edition“Hope” translates both espérance and espoir, making the English less lexically varied.
  • A reading distinctionThe assurances spoken by Cazalès in 15 April 1833 · ¶1 are reported dialogue.

Meaning

Espérance and espoir can designate religious trust, an anticipated future, or the smallest surviving possibility of relief. Désespoir ranges from loss of confidence in oneself to an experience imagined as separation from God. Context must decide its scale.

Use in the book

After the conversation about social duty in March 1833, contentment is identified as the expression of hope: recovery is anticipated before it is achieved. Hope also rests on divine generosity visible in nature, as Cazalès argues during the journey to the sea. But Guérin’s conviction of personal incapacity repeatedly narrows or extinguishes the future he can imagine for himself.

Despair is not simply the opposite of belief. During the May storm it is felt as darkness outside God and answered by a wish to unite his will with God’s. In later doubt the boundaries of self-disbelief expand over the world. The hoped-for remedy correspondingly changes: not proof of his own success, but trust that Providence may be using him for an unknown good. Bereavement introduces another form, in which images of the departed confirm hope while leaving pain undiminished.

These alternations should be read as recurrent acts of interpretation. A moment of assurance does not settle the notebook’s future, and a declaration of despair does not cancel every surviving attachment. Guérin often writes precisely at the point where a different reading of his condition becomes barely possible.

Places to read

  1. 6 March 1833 · ¶4The convalescent image makes present comfort an anticipation of recovery.
  2. 15 April 1833 · ¶1Cazalès links natural bounty to hope for human destiny beyond death.
  3. 1 May 1833 · ¶1Storm-driven despair is imagined as abandonment outside God, then interpreted through the will.
  4. 26 May 1834 · ¶1An unknown providential usefulness becomes refuge from the conviction of uselessness.
  5. 9 February 1835 · ¶2Images of Marie sustain hope without taking away the need to weep.

Translation in this edition

“Hope” translates both espérance and espoir, making the English less lexically varied. “Despair” at 1 May 1833 · ¶1 belongs to a qualified comparison, “like abandonment,” rather than an unqualified theological assertion of exclusion from God.

Source note

The assurances spoken by Cazalès in 15 April 1833 · ¶1 are reported dialogue. They influence Guérin’s experience but should not be silently converted into a fully settled creed of his own.