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66  Chapter 2 The Education of Maurice de Guérin When Marguerite Guyon and Marie de Laval, the heroines of Victorine Monniot’s Le Journal de Marguerite, boarded a ship bound for the Indian Ocean, their brothers, Gustave and Albéric, had to remain behind in Paris to complete their schooling. We learn no details of their studies; the Journal was a novel for girls, about girls, and Monniot saw no need to fill her readers in on what boys might do in school. The Parisian educational market, however, provided options for families like the fictional Guyons and Lavals who wanted their sons to receive an education that would prepare them for success in the world while also anchoring them to the church. Catholic boys’ secondary schools offered parents the assurance that their sons could grow up to enjoy professional success without abandoning the faith of their childhood. Rigorous discipline and surveillance that kept boys on the straight and narrow during their dangerous adolescent years were the keys to this outcome. In the all-encompassing atmosphere of the school, boys would complete their studies and successfully pass competitive examinations , gaining access to their desired professions without being distracted by adolescent enthusiasms and desires. Unlike Gustave or Albéric,Maurice de Guérin wore a cassock on his first day of school at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. Maurice, who was fourteen when he arrived in October 1824 as a boarder at Stanislas, had a vocation to the priesthood that his pious father Joseph intended to protect. The Guérins THE EDUCATION OF MAURICE DE GUÉRIN 67 were an impoverished noble family from the Tarn in the south of France,and Maurice had an elder brother,Erembert,who would carry on the family line and free the younger son for the priesthood. Their mother, who had been profoundly devout,had died in 1819 when her youngest,Maurice,was nine. His sisters, Marie (born 1808) and especially Eugénie (born 1805), nurtured their brother’s vocation vigilantly and looked to him to seal the family’s Catholic devotion. Joseph de Guérin chose the Collège Stanislas with great care: he wanted his son to have the advantages of a Parisian school and Parisian connections, but he worried about the temptations of city life and the prevalence of radical ideas in many Parisian student circles. His motherless son would need encouragement in his faith, Joseph believed,if his precocious vocation were to come to fruition.1 Although he missed his family and wrote about his homesickness, Maurice appears to have thrived at school, and he spent five years, from fourteen to nineteen, at Stanislas, never once returning home. He was proud of his success at school, where, he reported, he was one of the top students whom the headmaster invited to a “splendid lunch” where they toasted the king with good wine.2 Joseph was undoubtedly pleased, both with his son’s academic success and with his royalism. Maurice was also learning to appreciate his autonomy: he wrote his sisters about becoming a Parisian and familiarizing himself with the landmarks of the capital from the artworks at the Louvre to the exotic animals in the Jardin des plantes.3 Not surprisingly , Maurice’s school friends came to figure more prominently in his life than his family did. He embraced a notion of Catholic fraternity during his years at Stanislas that emphasized male friendship as a religious, intellectual, and social ideal. Catholic boarding school gave Maurice de Guérin the experience of being an autonomous young man but simultaneously embedded him in a loving society. For Maurice and many of his contemporaries, school was the setting in which a boy developed a sense of self—male autonomy emerged out of a highly structured communal experience. Maurice soon abandoned his cassock and redirected his ambitions toward literature, a goal that several 1. On the Guérin family, see Marie-Catherine Huet-Brichard, Maurice de Guérin (Paris, 1998); E. Decahors, Maurice de Guérin. Essai de biographie psychologique (textes et documents inédits) (Paris, 1932); Abel Lefranc, Maurice de Guérin d’après des documents inédits (Paris, 1910); and Emile Barthés, Eugénie de Guérin d’après des documents inédits,vol. 1,Avant la mort de son frère Maurice (Albi,Fr.,1929). 2. Decahors, Maurice de Guérin, 72, 79–80. 3. Maurice to his sisters, Oct. 6, 1824, and Maurice to Eugénie, Oct...

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