VI. o jours de mon printemps… – André Chénier

L. 1. couronnés de rose; rose for roses, for the sake of the
rhyme.

L. 16. Montigny. An estate belonging to the brothers Trudaine,
situated in Brie, eighteen leagues from Paris.

L. 17. où la Marne. At Maroeuil, where the family of his friend de
Pange had an estate.

Ll. 19, 20. A reminiscence of an epigram in the Greek Anthology
(Analecta, t. ii. p. 429, C. viii).

L. 22. Qu’il… les ménage. Let him humour them.

Ll. 23, 24. Qu’il plie… sa tête à la prière, et son âme aux
affronts, is slovenly written, the preposition à having a different
meaning in à la prière (for which see note to p. 1, l. 18) and in aux
affronts.

Ll. 41-44. Amphis in Stobaeus, Florilegium, lx.

L. 42. On pleure. This on where we should expect je must have been
attracted by the on in the sentence immediately preceding, and there
is a fine effect in its use instead of the invidious I. The avowal, in
this generalized shape, gains in discretion.

L. 51. mon pinceau. Chénier tried his hand at painting.

L. 57. à, by. See note to p. 7, l. 211. Here is a thirteenth-century
instance of à in the sense of by: ‘Me gardez que ne soie prise
à beste cuiverte,’ Berte (in LITTRÉ). Also this: ‘à tous se fit
aimer,’ Berte, where we find à constructed with a passive infinitive
connected with se laisser or se faire, a feature still extant in
the seventeenth century: ‘Je me laissai conduire à cet aimable guide,’
Racine, Iphig. II. i. 501. See Haase, § 125, Rem. ii. à = par has
lived on in such phrases as: faire faire un habit à un tailleur, voir
dire, voir faire, entendre dire à quelqu’un.

L. 71. lecteur. It was, in fact, with difficulty that Chénier was
prevailed upon to read out his poems. See below, l. 80, and p. 85, ll.
64-74.

L. 73. Abel. Abel-Louis-François de Malartic, Chevalier de Fondat,
1760-1804.

L. 76. nous présentions la main. Juvenal, Sat. i. 15.

L. 77. Et mon frère et Lebrun. Marie-Joseph Chénier, 1764-1811,
adopted, like André, the military career, which he left after two years,
and wrote tragedies, lyrical poems, epistles and satires, and also a
few prose works, the most esteemed of which is his Tableau de la
littérature française depuis 1789, a posthumous work, published in
1815. He was but an indifferent poet.

Pierre-Denis-Écouchard Lebrun, called the French Pindar by his admirers,
1729-1807, a versifier of talent, wrote odes (in which he successively
sang Louis XVI, the Republic, and the Empire), elegies, epistles,
epigrams (in which he really excelled), and a poem on Nature.

L. 78. fugitif de. Becq de Fouquières sees a Latinism here, while
quoting two instances from Rousseau and Lebrun. But as Descartes,
Bossuet, and Voltaire might be adduced too (see LITTRÉ), it is difficult
to accept his statement.