Poésies choisies de André Chénier
II. Terre, Terre Chérie....
Ll. 131, 132. le libre encens d'une lyre au coeur chaste. An incoherent metaphor.
II. TERRE, TERRE CHÉRIE....
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.
III. LE RAT DE VILLE ET LE RAT DES CHAMPS.
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.