L. 44. ils s'écrivent des fleurs. This is as happy as it is bold. As much may be said of: 'Lit en bouquet la lettre...,' l. 50. All this fragment is gracefully ingenious.
L. 46. sa durée. The duration of the 'flame,' of course.
L. 1. Il n'est que de = le mieux est de... 'Il n'est que de jouer d'adresse en ce monde,' Molière, Mal. Imag., interm, l. sc. vi. être roi, king over oneself... as is explained at l. 4. Cf. Horace, Sat. 1. iii. 132, and Epist. I. i. 106.
L. 5. Mon Louvre. Racan, Stances: 'Roy de passions,... Sa cabane est son Louvre...'
L. 15. engagé, having engaged in (as Thackeray writes: 'Mr. B.,... engaging in a labyrinth of stables,' Newcomes, i. 127), i.e. having penetrated into.
L. 5. Virgil, Georg. ii. 150 ff.
L. 14. les hauts Pyrénées, generally feminine, e.g. 'Pyrénées Orientales.' But Chénier thinks of them as 'les Monts Pyrénées.'
L. 18. Respire, breathes (forth).
L. 19. couvrant, goes with la Provence.
L. 36. Incertaine. Because it shifts its channel.
L. 44. Que visite Phoebus le soir ou le matin. A poetic translation of Orient and Occident.
L. 47. l'une et l'autre Téthys. Catullus, 'Uterque Neptunus,' xxxi. 3. Cf. notes to Nérée, p. 90, l. 95, and Cybèle, p. 91, l. 133.
L. 50. Trudaine. The grandfather of Chénier's friend, who was Director of Public Works under Louis XV, and laid out the fine roads of France.
L. 54. impie. Not, of course, irreligious, but sacrilegious, as invading the (to a Frenchman) sacred territory of France—in the course of what Charles Lamb ironically calls 'the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the great French and English nations.'—Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist. See another use of impie, p. 112, l. 107.
L. 83. Le sel. An allusion to the gabelle or salt-tax imposed before the Revolution. This was written before 1789.
L. 85. Mille brigands, the partisans or men who constituted partis or societies for the levy of certain taxes.
L. 97. Malesherbes, Turgot. These Ministers retired in 1776, but Malesherbes resumed office, only for a few months, in 1787.
L. 105. armer d'injustes plaintes. Cf. note to p. 4, l. 100.
Ll. 107. impie. Offending honour, considered as a religion. Cf. p. 110, l. 54.
Ll. 131, 132. le libre encens d'une lyre au coeur chaste. An incoherent metaphor.
L. 3. Romans, a town in the department of Drôme where the States General of Dauphiné were held in 1788 as a prelude to the Revolution.
Translated from Horace, Sat. II. vi. 80. Compare the much freer imitation or rather adaptation of Pope, p. 444 of Globe edition.
L. 10. une dent dédaigneuse. Horace's 'Dente superbo.'
L. 16. ici près, a feature of colloquialism very much in place. In the same way does Molière use 'ici dessous, L'Êt., I. iv., 'ici dedans,' Pré. vii., 'ici autour,' D. Juan, III. ii.
L. 19. Les grands ni les petits. Grammarians find fault with sentences in which ni is not repeated before each of the subjects or objects, but usage is against them. Haase, § 140, Rem. iii. Ayer, § 263, 3. LITTRÉ, ni, 1°, observes that the instances he quotes are in verse, but that they might be imitated in prose.
L. 22. et d'aller. For the French historic infinitive see Meyer-Lübke, t, iii. p. 592, who does not think it a continuance of the Latin historic infinitive, but a new thing, as the various Romance languages follow in this sensibly different ways. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese using the infinitive with the preposition à (which occurs in quite isolated cases in French: 'et bon prestre à soy-retirer,' Cent Nouvelles nouvelles) Is the verb 'to begin' understood? Meyer-Lübke thinks that the infinitive with de is used only because it was more generally employed, at the time when this turn of phrase originated, than the simple infinitive.
L. 31. S'empresse de servir, ordonner, disposer. Observe the rapidity imparted to the sentence by the omission of de before the last two infinitives, a departure from the more common and regular practice.
L. 32. excuser. Used absolutely = 'be indulgent.'
L. 35. La tristesse.... This rapid review of the Country Rat's grievances—all nouns and no verb—reminds one of a similar turn in La Fontaine's La Mort et le Bûcheron, when the poor wood-cutter sees at a glance all his past life: 'Point de pain quelquefois, et jamais de repos.'
L. 38. et de rire. See note to l. 22.
L. 5. la glace inquiète. The restless looking-glass, whose reflection flits about.
L. 10. fluide, evanescent.
This short fragment was first published in the edition of G. de Chénier, 1874, among a few others under the general heading of 'Satires.'
L. 9. Mes pénates secrets. Chénier, in 1792, after the death of the king, in whose defence he had written, almost despairing of the future of his country, fallen into the hands of Robespierre, Collot d'Herbois and Saint-Just, left Paris for Versailles, where his grief was somewhat alleviated by his love for Fanny, Mme Laurent Lecoulteux. See note to p. 75, Sur la mort d'un enfant, l. 1.
L. 11. Vont dirigeant. See note to p. 27, l. 29.
L. 13. Les chars. See note to p. 56, l. 15.
L. 37. rivage. Not in the precise sense 'shore,' but, more vaguely, 'country,' 'place.' Thus F. climat and E. climate (or clime) have had their meaning extended to that of 'region.'
L. 48. Langage d'amour si des dieux. Expressed archaically for langage de l'amour.
L. 60. An allusion to the massacres of prisoners at Versailles in September, 1792.
L. 6. hymne infâme. Many poems were written on the occasion of Marat's death, among which one by Audouin, a deputy.
L. 9. Dérobe... Robs, frustrates, glorious deeds of their due praise.
Ll. 27-30. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, 667.
L. 32. Paros. One of the Cyclades, famed for its white marble (Parian marble).
L. 33. Harmodius... son ami. Harmodius and Aristogiton, who conspired with a few others to murder Hipparchus, younger brother of the tyrant Hippias, and Hipparchus himself, but succeeded in slaying Hipparchus alone. Harmodius was cut down on the spot by the guards, and Aristogiton was soon captured and tortured to death. When Hippias was expelled, Harmodius and Aristogiton became the most popular of Athenian heroes (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
L. 57. Like Dido, when she has resolved to die. Virgil, Aen. iv. 475.
This celebrated poem was written in the prison de Saint-Lazare. La Jeune Captive was a Mademoiselle de Coigny. She had, at the age of fifteen, married the Marquis de Rosset, later on Duc de Fleury. She was twenty-five at the time of her imprisonment. She was set free after the 9th of Thermidor. This poem first appeared in the Décade philosophique, hardly six months after the death of Chénier.
L. 11. Pindar, Nem. vii. 77.
Ll. 28-30. Cf. p. 52, ll. 43, 44.
Ll. 34, 35. Cf. p. 52, l. 42.
L. 36. Cf. p. 52, l. 41.
L. 39. dévore. For the verb in the singular see note to p. 25, l. 74.
L. 40. Palès. The goddess of shepherds. This mythological allusion strangely mars this fine poem.
L. 43. triste et captif. A kind of ablative absolute.
Ll. 53, 54. This madrigal winding up this pathetic lyric is in poor taste indeed.
This poem first appeared in the Journal de Paris, on April 15, 1792, the day of the festival. In 1790 the Swiss Regiment of Chateauvieux at Nancy had mutinied, seized the military chest, and killed heroic young Desilles, captain of the Régiment du Roi, who was attempting to prevent fratricide bloodshed. For these misdeeds they were condemned to the galleys. In 1792 they were amnestied by a decree of the National Assembly, and Collot d'Herbois, at the Club des Jacobins, carried a motion that they should make a triumphal entry into Paris. See Carlyle, French Revol., pt. ii, bk. ii, ch. vi, and bk. vi, ch. x.
Against this disgraceful resolution Chénier rose indignantly in several letters to the editors of the Journal de Paris, in an address to the National Assembly, and in the present poem.
L. 3. Désille. See the above introductory notice.
L. 6. The body of Mirabeau was transferred to the Pantheon on April 5, 1791.
L. 10. Voltaire died in Paris in 1778, but as the clergy had not been called upon to assist him at his last moments his body was denied sepulture in Paris, and was buried at the Abbey of Scellières, of which a nephew of his was commendator. His remains, however, re-entered Paris solemnly on July 11 of the same year, where they lie in the crypt of the Pantheon.
L. 15. tu conduiras Jourdan. Tu refers to divin triomphe. Jourdan, nicknamed Coupe-tête, was at the head of the brigands of Vaucluse during the disturbances in the South of France in October, 1791.
L. 17. Coblentz. The general quarters of the Émigrés.
L. 27. An allusion to a meal taken in common by Pétion and his colleagues of the Commune of Paris at a tavern, at La Râpée-Bercy, which they had caused to be mentioned in newspapers belonging to their party as something to be proud of.
L. 34. Persans. The appellation Persans is generally reserved for the Persians of to-day, the ancient Persians being designated as les Perses.
L. 45. Eudoxus and Hipparchus, two celebrated ancient astronomers.
Ll. 46-8. Berenice's hair, a small northern constellation near the tail of Leo. Berenice was the wife of Ptolemy Energetes, king of Egypt, c. 248 B. C.
L. 49. Argo, a constellation in the Southern Hemisphere.
L. 55. en leur galère. 'The forty Swiss,' writes Carlyle, 'were mounted into a triumphal car resembling a ship,' Fr. Rev. II. iii, x.
The two following pieces, dated from St.-Lazare, were written in the prison in a minute handwriting on small slips of paper concealed by Chénier in the linen that was fetched home to wash.
L. 23. Fouquier. A blank in the MS. Fouquier-Tinville, the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Ll. 5-8. 'L'habitude est une seconde nature,' says a French proverb. This elaborate periphrasis verifies it. And no doubt but Chénier composed these lines in terrible earnest when he was daily expecting death. How can we say after this that the far-fetched conceits of Richard II in his prison (K. Rich. II, V. v.) are not what it was likely he should indulge in, in his desperate situation?
L. 15. In the first edition the poem here came to an abrupt end. In that of 1826 the fifteen lines were given as having been written by Chénier but few moments before being taken to execution. The following nine lines were altogether omitted, and the rest of the piece given as a separate poem.
L. 35. Var.: La bassesse, la feinte—le désespoir, la honte.
L. 58. Mourir...! The infinitive used absolutely as an exclamation (or interrogation) in order to express surprise or indignation: 'Moi, me taire!' 'A qui se fier à présent?' 'Offenser de la sorte une sainte personne!'—MOLIÈRE. See Ayer, § 209, 4: Mever-Lübke, § 528.
L. 81. noirs de leur ressemblance. Black with their likeness energetically expressed.
L. 83. fouet. A monosyllable, pronounced fouè, and not foi, as some will do.—LITTRÉ.
L. 85. cracher sur leurs noms. Chénier does not mince it in these ïambes.