Born at the Chateau le Cayla in the countryside near Toulouse in 1810, Maurice de Guérin’s writing was heavily influenced by nature. He was the younger brother of Eugénie, a writer noted for her journals and letters, who was a major influence and confidante. Maurice was raised a strict Catholic, and educated at a seminary in Toulouse. He studied at the College Stanislaus de Paris, where he met the novelist Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly. When he graduated in 1831 he lived in Brittany in a radical Christian society founded by de Lamennais. Two years later the society disbanded and de Guérin broke with Catholicism and moved to Paris. He fell ill and in 1839 died of tuberculosis at Le Cayla. Unpublished during his lifetime, George Sand published his prose poem The Centaur – the work he is most known for -- and one of his poems in the Revue des Deux Mondes.