Guérin Lexicon

A companion for reading

This lexicon accompanies Maurice de Guérin’s The Green Notebook in the complete bilingual edition prepared for Diotimos in 2026. Its 165 articles follow the book’s French words, recurring images, intellectual distinctions, places, books and people. The English headwords provide a practical alphabetical entrance; the French forms keep the interpretation connected to Guérin’s wording. Selection concentrates on recurring terms and on single passages whose allusions or unusual diction need explanation.

Guérin’s words change their pressure as he moves from Le Cayla and La Chênaie to the coast and Paris. Nature can nourish perception and also sharpen estrangement. Solitude may shelter a vocation or disclose an inability to act. Poetry is at once a way of apprehending the world and a promise whose fulfilment remains uncertain. The articles trace these changes through particular passages instead of presenting a finished philosophical system.

The text and its limits

The main corpus consists of 116 dated entries, in 188 French–English paragraph pairs, from 10 July 1832 to 13 October 1835. It follows the Journal section of Journal, lettres et poèmes, edited by G. S. Trébutien, sixth edition (Paris: Didier et Cie, 1864), printed pages 3–126 (1864 facsimile). Completeness means that printed section, not a complete transcription of Guérin’s autograph notebook. The letters and poems which follow it are outside the present corpus.

The supplied edition also prints five earlier passages in a separate appendix: the end of 7 December and the entries of 8, 9, 20 and 21 December 1833, in twelve paragraph pairs. Their witness is Trébutien’s Reliquiae, volume I (Paris: Didier et Cie, 1861), pages 83–99 (1861 facsimile). The 1864 editor refers to pages 83–97; the appendix continues through page 99 to finish the 21 December entry. These twelve paragraphs are cited as 1861 variants. They are never silently inserted into the 1864 chronology. Differences of expression or incident belong to different printed witnesses; the lexicon does not independently establish the sequence of composition.

The historical editor says that the 1864 text substitutes wording written later on loose sheets and conjectures that Guérin would have preferred it. That preference is the editor’s conjecture, not an authenticated declaration by Guérin. Historical notes and the 24 translator’s notes of 2026 are apparatus, not passages of Guérin’s journal. This companion follows the supplied bilingual edition; it is not a new manuscript collation or a critical edition.

How to use an article

The word explains the French sense or identifies the image, person or book. Contextual glosses clarify what a word does in these passages; they are not claims to exhaustive historical lexicography. In Guérin develops an interpretation across selected uses. English conceptual headwords sometimes gather several related French expressions, without declaring them synonyms.

The places gives annotated passages, each with its date, printed historical source pages and stable paragraph identifier. In this edition compares the supplied French and English or explains a relevant editorial choice. See also offers related articles. Footnotes preserve source cautions, translation distinctions and supplementary observations. Additional named discussions appear only where an article needs them.

The citations are selective reading guides, not an exhaustive word concordance. Main-text identifiers begin mg-j1864; variant identifiers begin mg-r1861. The page ranges are historical source pages retained by the bilingual data, not the page numbers of this lexicon or the 124-page bilingual PDF. For a variant, a page range may locate the whole dated entry rather than the individual paragraph. The identifier remains the precise paragraph locator across formats.

Three routes back into the book

The French forms and English aliases index adapts the lexical and bilingual lookup functions of the earlier Stobaeus and Traherne companions. French needs no transliteration index. This first index connects French wording and alternate English labels to the principal article, with no implication that all labels are interchangeable. The Passage index leads from a cited paragraph to the articles that discuss it; the 1861 material has its own section. The Thematic index collects intersecting routes through perception, inward life, poetry, faith and cultural context.

Quotations reproduce the supplied bilingual text. Interpretive language belongs to this companion unless explicitly attributed. A modern identification of an allusion is distinguished from a name actually given by Guérin. The digital editions link articles and indexes; the print and Word contents provide page references for their respective layouts.