Ll. 59, 60. sur leur jeune sein... leur robe. He says leur, as if everybody ought to understand him, because his own thought is full of them—those dancing fair ones mentioned in the following line. This, as well as the preceding 'presse' and 'la mienne' higher up, is of those true touches that carry us into the atmosphere of life.
L. 65. Reminiscences of Virgil, Ecl. v. 58; Georg. ii. 151.
L. 70. cette vierge dansante. The first editor had altered this into 'cette vierge charmante,' either because the epithet recurs at ll. 61, 89, or because he objected to this declension, or rather adjectival use, of the past participle. For this syntactical feature see Darmesteter et Hatzfeld, Le seizième siècle en France, §210; Haase, §91. See also note to p. 62, l. 19.
L. 71. Pallas (Od. i. 58) represents Ulysses as longing to see 'His country's smoke leap from her chimney tops.'—CHAPMAN.
L. 74. enchante ta vieillesse. An easy correction would be enchantent, which would not spoil the metre, but, as a rule, Chénier makes the verb agree with the last subject. See Ayer, §217.
Ll. 76, 77. Tibullus, i. 3. 8.
L. 80. Viendras-tu point...? The omission of ne in direct interrogation, very frequent in the seventeenth century, is still to be met with in modern poetry, e.g.: 'Viendras-tu pas voir mes ondines?'—V. Hugo, Ballades, 4. (Haase, §101 A.)
L. 84. Racine, Phèdre, I. iii: 'Ariane, ma soeur, de quel amour blessée...'
L. 93. Virgil, Ecl. vi. 21 'Aegle naiadum pulcherrima...'
L. 95. ne sera-ce point. A future of doubt.
L. 103. Ovid, Met. i. 481.
L. 105. garde que jamais elle soit... Ne was generally omitted in the seventeenth century after expressions of fear and after garde, gardez, prenez garde (Haase, §104 B).
L. 109. va la trouver. Cf. the first scene of the third act of Racine's Phèdre. The entire poem is to some extent the counterpart of Racine's play.
L. 126. d'âge chancelante. Cf. Aen. iv. 641.
L. 132. L'insensé. In the sense, Becq de Fouquières remarks, not of demens, but of amens, as in Ovid, Am. iii II. 25.
The subject of the poem is taken from Theocritus, Id. xiii., and Virgil, Ecl. vi.
L. 1. Le navire éloquent. Argo, which Malherbe calls 'le navire qui parlait,' Lebrun 'la nef à voix humaine,' and Chénier himself in a fragment (XLIX., p. 118 of the first volume of the edition published in 1874 by G. de Chénier), 'le vaisseau parleur.'
L. 2. Colchos. This Colchos has never had any existence except in the imagination of French poets. It is, in fact, the accusative of Colchi, the Colchians, or inhabitants of Colchis, mistaken for the name of a town.
Ll. 12-14. Et leur onde... un... zéphire, un murmure... 'l'avertit. The verb is in the singular, agreeing with the last subject, as is the constant practice with Chénier. Cf. note to p. 25, l. 74.
L. 14. et soupire. The first editor has corrected this into et l'attire. But the nymph first attracts the attention of the boy and then sighs out her desire (as again on l. 19).
L. 15. jette des fleurs. Jeter is said of plants and trees (E. shoot), whence rejeton (E. shoot).
L. 20. il l'admire couler. See note to p. 8, l, 260.
L. 26. Sur leur sein, dans leurs bras, assis... Elliptical: 'he sitting on their knees,' For this sense of sein see note to p. 24, l. 48.
L. 29. Leurs mains vont caressant. Aller with the gerund of a verb was a periphrase much in vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and meaning nothing more than the verb itself. It is now of rare use, except in poetry (Haase, §70 A). Palsgrave says that 'que je vous yraye devisant' amounts to 'que vous deviseroye,' Littré, however, in his dictionary (s. v. 'aller,' 21), says that it expresses continuity.
L. 30. étamine. This is, Sainte-Beuve observes, the prima lanugine malas of the Latins. Cf. 'Flaventem prima lanngine malas... 'Clytium,' Aen. x. 324, 'downy-cheeked Clytius'; or 'Clytius in his beardless bloom,' as Dryden, not very accurately, renders it. For étamine see note to p. 50, l. 38.
Ll. 38, 39. Virgil, Ecl. vi. 43.
Ll. 46-52. The syntax of this sentence would incur the blame of a strict grammarian. He would first observe that in the wording, 'pour te paraître belle, l'eau pure...,' it is pure water that is represented as wanting to appear at its best, and that, in order to avoid this absurdity, the author should have written 'pour te paraître belle, elle (the idyll a...)—in short, the construction that reappears in the following clause, 'elle a pressé ses flancs....' Next he might perhaps object to 'Et des fleurs sur son sein ... et sa flûte à la main,' a clause in which he would miss the verb. But say 'elle met des fleurs sur son sein, etc., et elle prend sa flûte à la main,' and notice the loss in vivacity. As the young person bustles, so does the sentence.
L. 51. les pipeaux de Segrais. Segrais (1624-1701) wrote idylls praised by Boileau. He also had a hand in the composition of the two novels of Mme de la Fayette, Zaïde and La Princesse de Clèves, and gave a metrical translation of the Aeneid, now forgotten.
L. 52. connus... aux nymphes. Both connu à and connu de are said, though the latter is more common at the present day.
This touching elegy, Becq de Fouquières observes, was suggested to Chénier by the following funereal epigram of Xenocritus of Rhodes in the Greek Anthology: 'Thy locks are still dripping, unfortunate maid, O Lysidice, poor shipwrecked creature, dead in the salt flood. As the waves leapt wild, thou, dismayed by the violence of the sea, fellst out of the ship; and now on a tombstone are read thy name and that of Cyme, the place of thy birth, but thy remains have been washed to some chill shore; a bitter grief to thy father Aristomachus, who, accompanying thee to the house of thy husband, brought him neither a bride nor a corpse.'
L. 2. Oiseaux chers à Thétis. 'Dilectae Thetidi alcyones,' Virgil, Georg. i. 399.
L. 3. Elle a vécu. A euphemism, adopted from the Latin, for elle est morte, used in elevated style. Thus Corneille: 'Non, non; avant ce coup Sabine aura vécu.'—Horace, II. vi.
L. 4. Camarine, a town in Sicily.
L. 5. l'hymen, the hymeneal song.
L. 8. Dans le cèdre: an accurate detail. Cf. Euripides, Alc. 160.
L. 11. invoquant les étoiles. A reminiscence, happily adapted, of Virgil, Aen. vi. 338: 'Palinurus... who, while he steering viewed the stars,... Fell headlong down.'—DRYDEN.
L. 13. étonnée. Étonner, whence E. astun, stun, astony, astonish, astound, from L. extonare class. L. attonare, to strike with a thunderbolt, originally 'to strike senseless, powerless.' It is here nearer this sense than weakened sense of 'to surprise'.
L. 21. dans ce monument. We here find that we are reading a 'funerary epigram' or epitaph.
L. 22. cap du Zéphyr. Cape Zephyrium at the southern end of Brutium.
L. 25. traînant un long deuil. Chénier thus renews, with advantage to the meaning, the current phrase: 'mener (=carry on) un deuil,' to make dole, mourn. This use of mener (cf. L. ducere in same sense) may be paralleled in English by the archaic 'lead great joy' (Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon, xx. 446), 'lead sorrow,' Partenay, 3785 (N.E.D., s. v. lead, 11 and 12 b).
This piece, Becq de Fouquières remarks, is imitated from an idyll of Moschus (ii. 95 ff.).
L. 3. Anacreon, xxxv.
Ll. 5-7, Ovid, Met. ii. 874.
L. 7. les pleurs dans les yeux. The current phrase is les larmes aux yeux.
Ll. 9, 10. Ovid, Fast. v. 611.
L. 10. sous soi. In The Public School Elementary French Grammar by Brachet we read (par. 96): 'In modern French, soi is only used when the subject is on, tout le monde, chacun, etc., or after an impersonal verb.' But this is contradicted by the practice of the best authors. See Littré, Dict., s. v. 'Soi,' Remarque; Haase, §13. Cf. note to p. 19, l. 38.
L. 20. le flatte. This sense of F. flatter was adopted in English, but has long been obsolete. Under the date 1599 there is a curious instance of this use in the N. E. D.: 'Trout is a fish that loveth to be flattered and clawed in the water.'
L. 22. Ovid. Met. ii. 868.
Ll. 3-12. Virgil, Ecl. vi. 41 ff.
L. 4. Four lines are missing here, which, being omitted in most editions, had escaped us. We here give them:
Certe, aux antres d'Amnise, assez votre Lucine
Donnait de beaux neveux aux mères de Gortyne;
Certes, vous élevez, aux gymnases crétois,
D'autres jeunes troupeaux plus dignes de ton choix.
L. 6. son antique pâture. Antique here means 'former' as in: 'Dieu de Sion, rappelle, Rappelle en sa faveur tes antiques bontés,'—Racine, Athalie, III. vii. The same use of antique occurs in Chénier's prose.
Ll. 11. Si peut-être... Virgil's 'Si qua forte ferant oculis sese obvia nostris Errabunda bovis vestigia' (Ecl. vi. 57)—i.e., that we may see whether scattered traces will not meet our eyes.
Ll. 13-22. Ovid, De Arte Am. i. 313 ff.
L. 15. superbe amant. Virgil's 'superbos amantes,' Georg. iii. 217, 218.
L. 21. à la flamme lustrale. By the lustral or purificatory flame.
This idyll is imitated from Gessner's Clymene and Damon (or Daphne and Micon in some editions): 'Tell me, love, what wilt thou do with this little altar?... Dost thou not remember that in the days of our childhood it was our favourite resort? Then were we no taller than this young columbine. About the altar will I plant myrtle and rose bushes. If Pan protect them, their branches will soon overarch the altar and form a small temple of verdure.... Dost thou see these bushes? they still grow in the shape of an arbour, though untrimmed now; they were our bower. We built the vault as high as we could reach.... Had I not planted a little garden before the bower? Had we not hedged it in with rush? A sheep might have browsed off the hedge in a moment, it was so large.... Thou wast lucky to find a small mutilated image of Cupid. As a fond mother, thou wouldst lavish care and caresses on him; a nutshell was his cradle, where, lulled by thy songs, he would lie on rose leaves.' A cicada is also mentioned, which gets hurt in flying away. Then Damon: 'Thus passed the days of our childhood, when in our games thou wast my wife and I was thy husband.'
L. 5. As in Ovid, Met. xiii. 841, the giant Polyphemus compares himself to Jupiter, so here the child compares himself to his young goat.
Ll. 19-24. A translation of the fourteenth epigram of Anytus, p. 200, vol. i. [of the Anthology]. See also the twenty-ninth of Argentarius, vol. ii, p. 273. (Note of A. Chénier.) Anytus of Tegea lived 300 years before the Christian era.
L. 20. verte cigale. The cicada is brown. Chénier is here thinking of the large green grasshopper (Locusta viridissima).
L. 21. les honneurs. The honours of this tomb, that is, this tomb and its adjuncts destined to honour thy memory.
André Chénier had purposed to write sea-bucolics or idylls, which his notes, in which he indicates the genre of his poems by Greek abbreviations, designate as [Greek: Bouk. enal.] (that is, [Greek: Boukolika enalia]), [Greek: Eid. enal.] (i.e. [Greek: Eidullia enalia]). Dryas is one of them. It appeared for the first time in G. de Chénier's edition, 1874.
L. 4. aux mains. See note to p. 16, l. 308.
L. 6. tout se jette. Tout, i.e. tout le monde, as in 'Femmes, moines, vieillards, tout était descendu.'—La Fontaine, Fables, VIII. ix. 4. The verb agrees with tout, which sums up the enumeration. Ayer, §217, 3 b.
L. 8. Il remplit et couronne. Not of course in the sense in which Milton writes: 'Eve... their flowing cups With pleasant liquors crown'd' (Paradise Lost, v. 444). This sense is unknown in French. But see Rich, Dict. of Roman and Greek Antiq., s.v. 'coronatus.'
L. 19. dieux humides, water-gods. Thus Boileau: 'Il [le Rhin] voit fuir à grands pas ses naïades craintives Qui toutes accourant vers leur humide roi...'—Ep. iv. This invocation is taken from Propertius, III. vii. 57.
L. 23. les ondes avares. The greedy waves.
Ll. 29. et ses efforts nombreux... The sentence has been left unfinished.
L. 36. Virgil, Aen. iv. 304.
This piece is imitated from Ovid, Met. iv. II ff. It also contains reminiscences of Ovid, De Arte Am. i. 541; Catullus, lxiv. 225.
L. 1. Thyonée Thyoneus, i.e. son of Thyone, another name of Semele.
L. 2. Dionysius, Evan, Iacchus, Lenaeus, names of Bacchus. The origin of the first three is obscure, while Lenaeus is from [Greek: lêmos], a wine-press.
L. 9. étoilé. The fur of the lynx is spotted.
L. 11. aux axes de tes chars. Lat. axis (Fr. axe) is properly Fr. essieu (from Lat. axiculus), Eng. axle which has also been sometimes replaced by axis. (The O. E. word was ax (æx), related to Lat. axis.) But here axe is used, as in Latin, for roue, i.e. 'wheel.' See also note p. 65, XI, l. 2.
L. 17. Et le rauque tambour. Et does duty for ainsi que.
L. 18. Les hautbois tortueux—'tibia curva' Tibul, ii. I. 86.—les doubles crotales:, crotals, or crotala, are a sort of castanets. They are called doubles because they consisted of two little brass plates, or rods.
This short fragment is taken from Ovid, Met. viii. 743.
L. 3. porte un immense ombrage. I am under the impression that this happy use of porter has been suggested to Chénier by the term used in painting of ombre portée, defined by Littré (s.v. porté), 'ombre qu'un corps projette sur une surface.' Chénier frequented painters, and himself painted.
L. 5. bandeaux, fillets. See vittae in Rich, Dict. of Roman and Greek Antiq.
Ll. 2-4. Imprudent in being too credulous, Dejanira became the innocent cause of Hercules' death; for, fearing his infidelity, she sent her husband a robe or shirt that the Centaur Nessas had given her, and which he had said would preserve her husband's love to her. No sooner had Hercules put on the garment his wife gave him than he suffered terrible agony, under which he ordered a funeral pile to be kindled, and placed himself in its flames, thus falling a victim to the Centaur, Nessus, whom he had slain. Hercules killed Nessus because, carrying Dejanira over a river, he attempted to run away with her.
Ll. 5, 6. ta cime... amoncelle. Literally, 'thy top heaps up,' for 'thy top is heaped up with.'
L. 9. du vieux lion, the Nemean lion.
L. 2. Érichthon. Erichtonius, fourth king of Athens, son of Vulcan and the Earth, was a cripple, invented chariots, and, after his death, became the constellation of Auriga, or the Waggoner.
L. 5. axe, for char. See note to p. 65, XI, l. 2. For this line and the following see Virgil, Georg. iii. 113 ff.
Ll. 11-14. Virgil, Georg. iii. 191, 192.
L. 14. Agiter... leurs pas. Hurry (cf. agitato, in music=hurried) their pace, in opposition to mesurer, 'compose, moderate.'
L. 1.... Mais... This beginning shows that the piece is only a fragment. For this comparison see Ovid, Heroid. vii. 1, 2.
L. 7. Sébéthus. The river Sebetus runs through Campania. It is often mentioned by Sannazaro in his elegies, from which Chénier has borrowed the idea.
Ll. 9, 10. moi, celle qui te plus, moi, celle qui t'aimai. In this instance the agreement of the verbs with moi is condemned by modern grammarians. It would occur in the older language, and Bossuet himself has said, speaking of God, 'Je suis celui qui suis' (Lat. sum qui sum, Eng. 'I am that am,' Wyclif, Ex. iii. 14). See Littré, s.v. 'celui,' Rem. 4.
L. 16. A reminiscence of Catullus, lxiv. 117 ff.
L. 19. l'astre pur des deux frères d'Hélène. It is the 'fratres Helenae, lucida sidera' of Horace (Od. i. 3), namely Castor and Pollux. The constellation was said to be propitious to seafarers.
L. 21. Pæstum. A town in Lucania famous for its roses. See Virgil, Georg. iv. 118, 119.
L. 29. du sein de la mer. Il. i. 359-361. Thetis 'instantly appeared up from the grey sea like a cloud.'—CHAPMAN.
L. 30. comme un songe. In the Odyssey (xi. 207) the soul of Ulysses' mother vanishes (like a dream). Also Aen. vi. 702.
L. 1. Song of Solomon, i. 6.
Ll. 7-10. Song of Solomon, i. 7.
L. 8. le mol et doux coton. Cf., in N.E.D., Cotton. 'Down or soft hair growing on the body.' Obs. rare [so F. coton=poil, 1615, Crooke, Body of man, 65: 'Pubes doeth more properly signifie the Downe or cotton when it ariseth about those parts.'
L. 11. Ovid, Heroid. xv. 93-95.
L. 22. ce jeune Troyen, Ganymede.
L. 23. Adonis, whose mother, Myrrha, had before his birth been turned into a tree that distilled myrrh.
Ll. 1-8. Shakespeare, I Henry IV. iii. l. 214-222. That Chénier was sensible to the magic of this passage argues that, in spite of prejudices, he would recognize beauty wherever he found it.
L. 11. Car le... Becq de Fouquières conjectures that the poet would have written 'car le bel Endymion...,' or rather 'car le dieu d'amour...,' but was prevented by the metre.
L. 13. The song at the beginning of the fourth act of Measure for Measure gave Chénier the idea of these lines.
Ll. 11-20. An imitation of Bion, Idyll iv.
L. 15. et sa voix... Et here introduces a consequence, as in: 'Plus je vous envisage, Et moins je me remets, monsieur, votre visage,' Racine, Plaideurs, II, iv; or in 'give him an inch, and he take an ell.' Cf. p. 63, IX, l. 1.
L. 20. tu fais mes amours. Faire here is synonymous with être as in 'faire l'admiration de tous.'
L. 28. Te bêler mes amours. For another instance of this transitive use of bêler see p. 46, XXXIII, l. 10.
L. 32, Plutôt que te laisser. After que following a comparative, modern visage prefers de before the infinitive. See Haase, § 88.
L. 1. Toi, de Mopsus ami! Ironical. 'That thou never wast!' This beginning shows that these lines were meant as part of an eclogue: the subject to be two shepherds disputing the prize of singing. Mopsus is an excellent singer and poet mentioned in Virgil, Ecl. v. Berecynthus is a mountain in Phrygia on which the mysteries of Cybele were celebrated.
L. 3. Hyagnis. According to Apuleius, Flor. iii, Hyagnis was the father and teacher of Marsyas, the flute-player.
L. 4. énervé, emasculate. 'Semiviro Cybeles cum grege iunxit iter,' Martial, iii. 91.
L. 7. dans ce bui. Bui is spelt thus in order to rhyme for the eye with lui. 'Buis' for 'flute'; a metonymy.
L. 15. des chiens même. In poetry the adjective même often remains uninflected. 'Les immortels eux-même en sont persécutés,' Malherbe, i. 279, 26, Éd. des Grands Écrivains. 'Un éclat qui le rend respectable aux dieux même,' Racine, Esther, II. vii. 678, same edition. Haase, § 53, C.
This fragment is taken from the twenty-third idyll of Gessner.
L. 1. errante à travers. This inflected present participle is an archaism. See Haase, § 91. See also note to p. 25, l. 70, as well as p. 24, l. 61; p. 56, l. 8; p. 62, l. 19.
L. 4. Le pied-de-chèvre. The poets of the Pléiade used the compound chèvre-pied.
L. 6. leur risée. But only one nymph has been mentioned. It is understood that she meant to provide sport for her companions.
L. 1. L'impur et fier époux. Becq de Fouquières remarks that the he-goat is frequently designated by a periphrasis in Greek and Latin literature.
L. 3. averti de, aware of.
This fragment is a translation of the first idyll of Gessner.
L. 6. La source aux pieds d'argent. Cf. 'La nymphe aux pieds d'argent,' p. 59, l. 47. Cf. also Milton's 'silver-buskined Nymphs,' Arcades, 33.
These lines are imitated from an epigram of Evenus of Paras.
L. 1. Fille de Pandion. Pandion, son of and king of Athens, had two daughters, Procne and Philomela. Procne was ultimately turned into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. See Ovid, Met. vi. 412 ff.
L. 10. A ton nid. Nid for nichée: 'Et portant à son bec son modeste butin, De son nid babillard revient calmer la faim.'—Delille, En. xii (in LITTRÉ). In the same way 'nest,' in English, is used for 'brood.' Cf. Virgil, Georg. iv. 17, and La Font., Fables, X. vii. 17.
These lines are imitated from Thomson, Autumn, 167-174.
Becq de Fouquières observes that when André Chénier composed this short bucolic fragment the revolutionary storm was raging. Chénier, a suspect, threatened with arrest, was sick in body and mind, and had gone to the waters at Forges for a few days' rest.
L. 8. lent. Lent, in the sense of 'supple, flexible,' is a Latinism twice or thrice used by Chénier, and perhaps nowhere else to be found in French literature. The second instance occurs in his Art d'aimer, the third (doubtful) on p. 75, l. 17. 'Un cuir souple et lent thus forms a pleonasm which mars this piece otherwise so neat.
L. 10. The subject might tempt a sculptor.
A translation of the ninety-eighth epitaph of Leonidas of Tarentum, Anal. t. i, p. 246 (note of André Chénier). The abbreviation means: Analecta veterum poetarum, published by Brunck, in three vols.
L. 4. rendez, grant. E. render once had this sense. N.E.D., s.v. 7.
L. 5. Par Cérès. Only women swore by Ceres. Spanheim in Callimachus,p. 655 (note of André Chénier).
L. 6. légère, slight.
L. 10. Me bêler les accents.... Cf. note to p. 41, l. 28.
L. 16. le sein. Sein is said of a woman, mamelle of an animal. The word pis (Lat. pectus, E. dug) would be the proper word here.
L. 17. Et sera.... This inversion following the conjunction et was very frequent in the older language. In the seventeenth century it is to be met with only, and but seldom, in Malherbe and La Fontaine. See Haase, § 153 B. André Chénier is right in reviving old forms of expression when they come in handy. And here it cannot be denied that there is a gain in solemnity. Cf. note to p. 64, IX, l. 17.
L. 1. Secrets observateurs. Prying into the secrets of nature.
L. 7. les plaintives dryades. Is this mere poetic diction, as when Byron writes: 'the palm, the loftiest dryad of the woods,' Island, II, xi. 17. Though the garden described is one seen by a Frenchman of the eighteenth century, yet it is viewed with the eyes of a Greek pantheist.
L. 11. fidèle. True to nature.
L. 12. Loin du bois, comme si.... The uninverted order would be: 'Comme si Philomèle allait, loin du bois, chercher.'
l. 15. dont le printemps s'honore, which Spring boasts.
L. 5. Où te faut-il chercher? Understand 'Où faut-il te chercher?' The construction is ambiguous, and the sentence might be misunderstood as: 'where is it necessary for thee to seek?'
L. 5. la saison nouvelle. The renouveau, as our Old poets used to say, i. e. 'Spring.' So, in English, the 'new moon' (= F. la nouvelle lune), and Tennyson speaks of 'the new sun' (Geraint, 70).
Ll. 6-10. Petrarch, The Return of Spring, cclxix.
L. 11. gracieux. Not 'graceful' but 'gracious'—in my opini on at least.
L. 14. liquides. A very felicitous qualificative, apposite to both water and verse. Was Chénier the first of French poets to employ the phrase 'vers liquides'? Littré at least does not exemplify the use. It will hardly seem a novelty to the English student who has read of 'liquid notes, cadences,' &c.
Ll. 15, 16. Des vers... sont ce peuple de fleurs. An inversion in which the verb agrees with the predicate. See Ayer, § 212, 2.
Ll. 1-3. Compare these opening lines with the envoy or concluding part of Hylas, p. 28, l. 43.
L. 9. jeunesse prudente. In the sense of Latin prudens, 'wise.' Prudence is generally considered as an attribute of old age. 'La prudence est le fruit de la longue vie,' says the French (Sacy's) translation of the Bible, where the English Bible has: 'In length of days (is) understanding,' Job xii. 12.
L. 10. Pâlit. Pâlir sur des livres is a French idiom whose English equivalent would be 'to pore over books.'
L. 23. caresses d'amours. The s in amours is for the rime.
Ll. 1-4. Horace, Od. iii, 12.
Ll. 7, 8. Tibulius, I. viii. 7.
L. 20. Le suit encor. This hyperbole, frequent in poetry, Chénier seems to have been particularly fond of. Cf. note to p. 62, l. 39.
L. 22. nymphes. Nymphe, as well as coursier (l. 24), belonging to the poetic diction of those days, strike us as blemishes. But if we were to demur at such details we could hardly read anything written in the now accepted style.
Ll. 1-8. Imitated from Horace, Od. iii. 4.
L. 13. Seul Elliptical: 'when I am alone.'
L. 19. distraits, diverted from their uneasy, anxious thoughts.
Ll. 21-28. Imitated from Horace, Od. III. iv.
Ll. 23. Catile. Catilus and Tibur are one and the same place, now Tivoli (l. 26): Moenia Catile in Horace.
L. 24. Blandusie. Horace, Od. iii. 13, celebrates its fountain.
L. 26. Tivoli, i.e. Tibur, where Horace's villa stood.
L. 27. Horace, Od. II. xix.
L. 35. Theocritus, Id. iii. 12. Bruyante abeille is of course a nominative in apposition to Je. So with rose, &c.
L. 36. les délices, the sweets.
Ll. 37. Anthol. v. 84.
L. 38. étamine. A. Chénier seems to have used étamine, properly the stamen or male organ of flowers, for the pollen or fecundating dust which is secreted by the stamen. Cf. note to p. 27, l. 30.
L. 47. Anacreon, Od. xx. The thought, as a lover's wish, is hackneyed.
L. 61. périsse l'amant que satisfait la crainte! The meaning, not very obvious, but explained by the following lines, is: Beshrew that lover who is content to frighten his mistress into fidelity.
The following desponding lines were written by Chénier just before undertaking a journey to Switzerland and Italy. His friends, finding him in a very bad state of health, prevailed upon him to accompany them. His spirits seem to have been very low at that time, as appears from the thoughts of death he gives expression to, and numerous are the passages in which the melancholy mind of Chénier gloats upon death.
L. 1. je suis prêt à descendre. Grammarians have long distinguished between près de and prêt à, but writers never did, until lately, when prêt à was restricted to expressing 'ready to' and près de 'on the point of.'
L. 3. linceul. In the Dictionnaire des rimes françaises, by Jean Le Febvre, Paris, 1587, linceuil and linceul are given. Littré observes that both pronunciations are heard.
L. 13. reliques. The English student is likely to overlook this word, as English 'relics' means both (1) what remains as a memorial of a departed saint, martyr, or other holy person, and (2) the remains of a person, the body of one deceased. But this latter sense is of very rare occurrence in French, and Chénier uses it because, being seldom used, it is still all but novel. He thinks it 'fine and sonorous,' and proceeds to observe that Racine has it twice. Alfred de Musset, after him, employed reliques figuratively in; 'Les morts dorment en paix dans le sein de la terre; Ainsi doivent dormir nos sentiments éteints; Ces reliques du coeur ont aussi leur poussière; Sur leurs restes sacrés ne portons pas les mains.' Yet it is easy to see that in this instance both senses are implied.
L. 24. qu'il dut vivre longtemps. All editions, and our present selection after them, print dut without a circumflex accent. Dût is in fact the imperfect of the subjunctive used, as was usual in the older language and is still occasional in seventeenth-century French, for the pluperfect of the subjunctive, as in: 'Mais puisque son dédain, au lieu de le guérir, Ranime ton amour qu'il dût faire mourir. Sers-toi de mon pouvoir,' Corneille, Clit. II. iv. 484. So here dût stands for eût dû = aurait dû. See Haase, § 66 B.
L. 25. le meurtre jamais n'a souillé mon courage. Tibullus, iii. 5. 5 ff. When Chénier speaks of murder he has duelling in his mind, which he deprecated in his prose works. He also takes courage in its older sense, frequent in the great French classics, and the oldest sense, recorded in English, of 'the heart as the seat of feeling, thought, &c.; spirit, mind, disposition, nature.'—N.E.D.
L. 44. et voilà que je meurs, and behold I die: a Biblical term.
L. 49. mes feux. An instance of the conventional language of love, now exploded, like F. flamme and E. flame.
L. 52. L'ennui. Ennui here says something more than its adoption into English would suggest. The English student, in order to realize its force, should refer to its earlier adoption represented by the form annoy. The word originated, according to Diez, in the Latin phrase est mihi in odio. For the weakened sense of ennui, see p. 57, l. 41.
L. 53. à, for.
L. 56. N'allument... un... trépas. A bold phrase. The passage is from 'allumer une fièvre,' through 'allumer une fièvre mortelle,' to 'allumer une mort.'
L. 61. amour... mutuelle. Amour in the feminine is an archaism. Amour, Lat. amor, was feminine in Old French, as all such derivatives were and still are: douleur, peur, &c. Littré, s.v., Rem. 2; cf. p. 61, l. 18.
L. 27. Tibullus, ii. 1. 67.
L. 28. Becq de Fouquières, in his notes, gives an epigram of Julianus (with the reference Anth., Pl. 588), which he observes has inspired this thought.
L. 35. Tout, mais surtout les champs sont restés. Tout and les champs really belong to different propositions and the verb agrees with les champs. Cf. 'Somewhat, and in many cases a great deal, is put upon us.'—Butler, Analogy, Part I.
L. 44. L'astre, the sun, or Phoebus Apollo.
L. 92. De leur voix argentine. 'The silvery voice of glasses' is pretty. André Chénier is depicting a true heathenish paradise.
L. 98. ingrat à. We should rather say now ingrat envers. Many adjectives, Haase observes (§ 125 B), now followed by envers, pour, avec, de, &c., were constructed with à, e.g. 'A moins que d'être ingrate à mon libérateur.'—Corneille, Andr. v. 2, 1573.
L. 97. Qu'à ton tour... May, in return for thy ingratitude, the fair one...
L. 102. Ne t'ait vu de sa vie. May she pretend that she never saw you before.
M. Dezeimeris (Leçons diverses et remarques sur le texte de divers auteurs) has shown that Chénier, in this elegy, had borrowed not a few hints from Ausonius, Epistola X.
L. 1. solitaires divines. Which is the noun, which the adjective? Solitaire must be the noun (though certain critics have expressed the opinion that it is divine which is the noun). Firstly, there is the masculine noun 'un solitaire,' and it is hard to see why there should not be a feminine, 'une solitaire.' Secondly, the subsequent lines show that Chénier addresses the Muses as lovers of solitude, and it is more logical that the predominant idea should be embodied in the noun, not in the epithet.
L. 3. Nîme. Nîmes (earlier Nismes), in the dep. Gard. The final s has been dropped to admit the elision of the e. 'Nîmes égare' would have sounded most unnatural.
L. 5. aux bords de Loire. The omission of the definite article before Loire and Garonne is archaic. It was the current practice in the sixteenth century, and still occurs occasionally in the seventeenth.—Haase, § 3 B. It is to be noticed that in the next line Chénier writes 'ces nymphes du Rhône,' and, in fact, the omission of le before Rhône seems hardly possible. It is difficult to account for such anomalies. A few individual relics of former usage have thus survived. One of these is the phrase 'entre Sambre et Meuse.'
L. 7. son flambeau vous luit. Such constructions, where à followed by an indirect object, or implicitly contained in the dative of the unstressed personal pronoun, where the present language uses pour, were quite current formerly, and, though uncommon, may still be used.—Haase, § 125 B.
L. 8. Dansantes. The predilection of Chénier for the inflected present participle has now been illustrated by many instances. See p. 24, l. 61; p. 25, ll. 70, 89; p. 42, XXIV, l. 1.
Ll. 9-12. Cf. Cowley (Essays: Of Agriculture): 'One might as well undertake to dance in a crowd, as to make good verses in the midst of noise and tumult.'