Chapitre 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.

VI. LA JEUNE TARENTINE.

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).

VII. SUR UN GROUPE DE JUPITER ET D’EUROPE.

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.

VIII. PASIPHAÉ.

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,