Chapitre 74

Ll. 79-92. Here the simile of the founder has displaced that of the potter in the letter quoted above: ‘L’argile que j’avais amollie et humectée pour en faire un pot à l’eau, sous mon doigt capricieux, devient une tasse ou une théière.’

L. 94. Cf. La Fontaine, Épître à Mgr de Soissons.

L. 96. et je crée avec eux. Thus happily does Chénier characterize his attempt at original imitation. Another important declaration will be found at ll. 117-9.

L. 105. une pourpre…. The purpureus pannus or purple patch of Horace, Ars Poet. 15.

L. 109. brave, bold.

L. 124. fuit mes poétiques doigts. Once transformed by the poet’s hand, prose goes and dances and sings. An easy improvement would be to delete the ‘;’ after doigts and the ‘,’ after dansante.

L. 130. Les attache, i.e. les greffe, grafts them.

L. 140. Montaigne…. ‘Je veulx qu’ils donnent une nazarde à Plutarque sur mon nez,’ Ess. I. x. ‘I will have them wound Plutarch through my sides,’ Cotton’s translation.

 

POÈMES.

 

I. L’INVENTION.

L. 1. fis du Mincius: Virgil, born at Mantua, on the banks of the river Mincius (now Mincio).

L. 2. peuple-roi, Latin populus-rex, people-king.

L. 4. l’onde Égée. Tibullus’ Aegeas undas, i. 3.

L. 7. A most happy line. Cf. Horace, Ep. ad Pis., 323.

L. 9. Pope, Essay on Criticism, 181.

Ll. 20, 21. Pope, Essay on Criticism, 715.

Ll. 25-34. Horace, Ep. ad Pis., 1 ff.

L. 37. D’Ormus et d’Ariman. Ahriman, the spirit of darkness or evil genius; Ormuzd, the spirit of light or good demon in Persian mythology.

L. 46. Cf. Boileau: ‘Une pensée neuve est une pensée qui a dû venir à tout le monde et que quelqu’un s’avise le premier d’exprimer.’

L. 56. Xénophon, Memorab. iii. 10, makes Socrates set forth the same theory.

L. 62. Marot. Clément Marot, a French poet of the sixteenth century, who excelled in badinage.

Ll. 69. Sophocle et Eschyle—and Euripides, whom Chénier forgets.

L. 71. Des hommes immortels, Corneille and Racine.

L. 73. instruits. The s of instruits should be deleted.

L. 92. pour nord. Nord here stands for étoile du nord or étoile polaire. ‘Perdre la tramontane (the Mediterranean name of the Pole Star), la boussole, le nord,’ are familiar expressions, meaning ‘to be puzzled, not to know which way to turn, to lose one’s head.’

L. 95. du plus lointain Nérée. Poetical for Océan. Nereus, an ancient sea-god. Cf. une Cybèle neuve below, p. 91, l. 133.

L. 100. Horace, Ep. ad Pis., 156.

L. 130. Bailly, a French astronomer (1736-1793). He wrote an Histoire de l’Astronomie.

Ll. 133. Une Cybèle. Poetical for the earth, like Nérèe the sea, p. 90, l. 95.

L. 138. Cusco was once the capital of Peru. This shows that Chénier was then meditating the poem L’Amérique, of which he wrote only fragments.

L. 143. Négligeât. In colloquial French this would be, ‘Pensez-vous que leur main négligerait…?’ In the same way, ‘je ne pense pas qu’il vienne’ or ‘pensez-vous qu’il vienne’ would be ‘… qu’il viendra.’

L. 163. All the following passage is imitated from Petronius, Satyr, v.

L. 170. bassin pompeux. See A. Rich, Dict. of Roman and Greek Antiq., under Naumachia.

L. 178. Lucian, Quomod. hist. conser. sit, i, speaks of a kind of summer-madness which seized the inhabitants of Abdera. After witnessing the exciting performance of an actor, named Archelaüs, in Euripides’ Andromede, they went about shouting out this line from the play, ‘O Love, thou tyrant both of men and gods.’

L. 184. Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques, i.e. let us express modern, personal thoughts in a form worthy of antiquity.

L. 221. son vide, his empty mind.

L. 223, jette une rose. See note to p. 27, l. 15.

L. 243, Cf. Martial, VI. xv.

L. 248. ces larmes… Ovid, Met. ii. 584, explains the formation of amber by the tears the sisters of Phaeton shed.

L. 262. et dressent tes cheveux. G. de Chénier, in his edition, prints et dresser tes cheveux. But the correction is unnecessary, as the same transitive employment of the verb occurs in a fragment of Chénier: ‘[Il] verse une sueur froide et dresse ses cheveux.’

L. 272. le docte ciseau. Docte, meaning ‘scholarly,’ rather than ‘skilful,’ is, in my opinion at least, not very apposite here.

L. 277. flanes invaincus aux travaux, i.e. dans les travaux. See note to p. 16, l. 308. An allusion to Hercules.

L. 282. Apollo Belvedere.

L. 283. The Farnese Hercules.

L. 284. The Laocoon group.

L. 285. Michael Angelo’s Moses.

L. 294. Ce qu’eux-même. See note to p. 42, l. 15.

L. 298. Bailly, Hist. de l’Astronomie: ‘On ajoute qu’Épicure croyait que le soleil s’allumait le matin et s’éteignait le soir dans les eaux de l’Océan.’

Ll. 302. Bailly, Hist. de l’Astronomie: ‘La poésie, que nous appelons le langage des Dieux, était jadis la langue consacrée aux merveilles de la nature.’

Is it not illustrative of the force of habit that Chénier should denounce the exploitation of Fable and gods by poets in the very conventional language he might be expected to object to? In reading l. 297 one would think that he purposed to drop Tethys for ever, but then come Apollo, Calliope, Urania!

L. 307. Ou si. A very quaint interrogative turn which one is surprised to see Voltaire condemn in this line of Corneille: ‘Tombé-je dans l’erreur, ou si j’en vais sortir?’ Heracl. IV. iv. See LITTRÉ Si, 17°.

L. 309. Il n’est sot traducteur… This is a feature of old syntax still extant in modern French. La Fontaine, in the seventeenth century, still writes, in accordance with older usage, ‘Fille se coiffe volontiers,’ Fabl. IV. i. 39. We still omit the definite article after jamais: ‘Jamais homme ne reçut plus d’hommages.’ Haase, § 57.

L. 311. ambré. Perfumed with ambergris—in a figurative sense, of course._… à la glace…_ ‘Être à la glace, LITTRÉ (s.v. 5°), is said of such productions of the mind as the spectator or the reader, fail to move him.’ ‘Si Corneille avait dans le Cid le plan de l’Académie, le Cid était à la glace.’ Voltaire, Lettre d’Argental, 4 oct. 1760.

L. 313. d’abord. Synonyms: au premier abord, de prime abord, dès l’abord. The original meaning is, ‘as soon as you accost him or it, at the first contact.’ D’abordée is thus explained by Cotgrave: ‘At first, at first sight; as soon as they touched, incountred, or came, together.’ A synonymous expression d’arrivée, somewhat archaic.

L. 320. contraint d’être. See note to p. 102, l. 146.

L. 322. abuser. Deceive, disappoint, baffle.

L. 323. infidèle, an unfaithful interpreter of their meaning.

L. 327. Creusant dans les détours. In a figurative sense, as in ‘Les Anglais pensent profondément; Leur esprit, en cela, suit leur tempérament; Creusant dans les sujets et forts d’expériences, Ils étendent partout l’empire des sciences.’ La Fontaine, Fabl. xii. 23.

L. 329. Cf. Horace, Ep. ad Pis., 40, 311; Boileau, Art poét., i. 147-154. voit partout un nuage. So Montaigne: ‘Mes conceptions et mon jugement ne marchent qu’à tastons…; je veois encores du païs au delà, mais d’une veue trouble et en nuage, que je ne puis desmesler.’—_Essais_, I. xxv.

L. 338. l’embrasse. The whole thought is wrapped or clasped by the adequate expression.

L. 343. D’eux-même. See note to p. 42, l. 15.

L. 346. Io. The daughter of the river Inachus. Zeus, having fallen in no French reader of to-day would notice the word. It is a good old French word. We are thus made aware that it had been falling into disuse in the seventeenth century (when it occurs several times in La Fontaine and others), and especially in the eighteenth. E. reserene occurs in Temple.

 

FRAGMENT II. This was to be an episode. Alonzo d’Ercilla was a Spanish poet of the sixteenth century who, in a poem entitled Araucania, sang the conquest, achieved by the Spaniards, of the country south of Chili.

Ll. 24. aréneuse, an old, somewhat out-of-the-way word. It occurs in Rabelais.

L. 28. A climax inspired by Virgil, Aen. v. 319.

L. 52. le Dauphin. The Dolphin, a northern constellation, Delphinius.

L, 53. la Couronne. The crown, Corona borealis.

 

IV. L’ART D’AIMER.

 

Ll. 6, 7. Et qui pense… Il pense… This is a feature of old syntax. Instances of the construction occur in the seventeenth century: ‘Qui dit prude, il dit laide,’ LA FONTAINE. Sometimes the repetition may be made with a demonstrative pronoun: ‘Qui ne mourrait pour conserver son honneur, celui-là serait infâme, PASCAL.

L. 8. un durable sillon. Cf. ‘… having driven his plough through a morass which must close again behind it.’ Froude, Oceana, iii.

Ll. 29-34. Alpheus, in Elis (Peloponnesus), ‘that renowned flood, so often sung, Divine Alpheus, who, by secret sluice, Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse.’—Milton, Arcades, 29 ff. The nymph Arethusa, one of Diana’s nymphs, was by the goddess changed into a fountain, to save her from the pursuit of Alpheus, a hunter, while Alpheus himself became a river. Enna is a town in Sicily. The fact that the river Alpheus ran in a subterranean channel at several points in its course probably gave rise to the myth.

L. 34. amer, an obvious misprint for amère. Besides, with amer the line is deficient by one foot.

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.

 

V. LA RÉPUBLIQUE DES LETTRES.

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.

 

POÉSIES DIVERSES.

 

I. HYMNE A LA JUSTICE.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

IV. LA FRIVOLITÉ.

L. 5. la glace inquiète. The restless looking-glass, whose reflection flits about.

L. 10. fluide, evanescent.

 

V. LE POÈTE.

This short fragment was first published in the edition of G. de Chénier, 1874, among a few others under the general heading of ‘Satires.’

 

ODES.

 

I. A VERSAILLES.

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.

Ll. 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.

 

II. A MARIE-ANNE-CHARLOTTE CORDAY.

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.

 

III. LA JEUNE CAPTIVE.

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.

 

ÏAMBES.

 

I. HYMNE SUR L’ENTRÉE TRIOMPHALE DES SUISSES DE CHATEAUVIEUX.

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. 8. Désille. See the above introductory notice.

L. 6. The body of Mirabeau was transferred to the Pantheon on April 5,