Chapitre 176

L. 103. Accompagnant l’année en ses douze palais. Chénier, in another epistle, has written ‘Si je vis, le soleil aura passé deux fois Dans les douze palais où résident les mois.’ The twelve mansions or houses into which astrologers divided the sky. Chaucer uses ‘palace’ in the same sense: ‘Mars shal entre as fast as he may glyde In-to his next paleys to abyde,’ Compl. Mars, 53. See N.E.D. Brazais had written a poem, L’Année, which never appeared in print.

L. 105. A paraphrase of a line of Brazais’ unpublished poem: ‘Vierge, qui t’embellis par les rides du temps.’ Friendship, of course, is meant.

L. 111. tableaux fardés. Counterfeit, spurious. See the obs. verb fard in N.E.D.

L. 128. L’ami religieux. The following quotation (from the N.E.D.) may serve for an explanation: ‘A man devoted to a man, Loyal, religious in love’s hallowed vows.’ Porter, Angry wom. Abingd. (Percy Soc.), 37.

L. 130. Bavius, a Latin poetaster; see Virgil, Ecl. iii, 90. Zoilus, the detractor of Homer. Gacou, a French satiric poet of the seventeenth century, the libellous detractor of Boileau and J.-B. Rousseau. Linière, another French satiric poet of the seventeenth century, the declared enemy of Chapelain. (See Boileau, Sat. ix. 237.)

L. 147. Plutarch relates that Scipio would always take Lelius’ advice, which made him say that Lelius was the poet and Scipio the actor. Plutarch, An seni sit ger. resp. xxvii.

L. 148. When Phocion, sentenced to death, was on the point of drinking the hemlock, Nicocles besought the favour of drinking first, which request his friend granted. Plutarch, Phoc. xxxvi.

L. 168. faisceaux, the fasces.

L. 201. âme mutuelle. A new alliance of words, on the analogy of affection mutuelle.

L. 202. Cf. Theocritus, Idyll. xii. 18.

Ll. 207, 208. ils s’attendent… d’être. S’attendre de is now of rarer occurrence than s’attendre à, but it was not so formerly. ‘On ne s’attendait guère De voir Ulysse en cette affaire.’ La Fontaine, Fab. X. iii. See LITTRÉ.

II. AMI, CHEZ NOS FRANÇAIS.

L. 16. Sans aller refers to me, the object in the principal clause. Sans que j’aille would be better syntax. But the prepositional infinitive was used in older French in a still more disconnected manner. ‘Rends-le-moi sans te fouiller,’ writes Molière, L’Avare I. iii., could easily be more explicit, with: ‘without me or my searching you,’ See Haase, § 85 D.

Ll. 16-19. See Boileau, Sat. ix. 221-5, who is here excellently satirized.

L. 28. An allusion to the fable of the Fox and the Grapes. La Fontaine, Fab. III. xi.

L. 41. Non d’aller. An abrupt change in the construction. The meaning is: ‘But it is not useful to go…’

Ll. 47-60. The germ of all this development is in a letter of Chénier to his friend de Pange: ‘Tu sais combien mes muses sont vagabondes. Elles ne peuvent achever promptement un seul projet; elles en font marcher cent à la fois (a general marshalling his troops, ll. 49, 50). Elles font un pied à ce poème et une épaule à celui-là. Ils boitent tous et ils seront sur pieds tous ensemble (The image of the sculptor, ll. 51-6). Elles les couvent tous à la fois; ils sortiront tous à la fois’ (the simile of incubation, ll. 57-60).

L. 59. Sauront. This use of savoir, as also that of pouvoir, so frequent in French, in sentences where the English translation is fain to omit them, is a French idiom, especially noticeable in the language of the seventeenth century. An Englishman cannot help being made aware of this feature when reading Molière, for instance.

L. 71. des traits. Whatever there is that is salient, striking, brilliant, in a literary composition, LITTRÉ says, s.v. 31°: fine touches.

Ll. 73. inspire. For the verb in the singular see note to p. 25, l.