XI. souffre un moment encor… – André Chénier

L. 2. L’axe, the wheel. Thus Homer, Il. xvi. 378, uses [Greek: axôn]
for [Greek: trochos], Chénier was particularly fond of this word, and
a note of his lets us into the secret of his affection for it. Having
written, in a sketch of another piece, ‘Si d’un axe brûlant le soleil
nous éclaire,’ he observes, ‘I like axe better than char. It is less
trivial. The Latins say it everywhere: « Volat vi fervidus axis, » Virg.
(Georg. iii. 107); « Spoliis onerato Caesaris axe » Propert. (ii. 3.
13).’ Anacreon, Od. iv, compares human life to a wheel. Cf. BUCOLICS,
XIV, p. 35, l. 5.

L. 4. Horace, Od. ii. 9: a reminiscence already met with, see p. 14,
l. 209.

Ll. 17, 18. Moi qui…mon réveil. Cf. this other instance occurring in
Chénier, ‘Moi, l’espérance amie est bien loin de mon coeur.’ As we say,
‘mon coeur à moi,’ for the sake of emphasis, we can also, somewhat
more disconnectedly; say ‘moi, mon coeur est sans espoir,’ ‘elle,
son coeur est libre.’ The thought expressed here is a reminiscence of La
Fontaine, Fabl. VII. xii.

L. 20. Le nocher… Nocher (from Lat. nauclerus, Greek [Greek:
nauklêros]), formerly a master’s mate or a skipper, is, with
nautonier, a poetic word for pilote.

L. 21. d’esclaves abondant. Abondant en esclaves would be more
accordant with modern usage. La Bruyère writes, ‘Si les hommes abondent
de biens’ (in LITTRÉ), and Haase, § 114, illustrates the construction
with a quotation from a letter of La Fontaine.

L. 23. du Potose. Cerro de Potosi, a mountain of Bolivia, rich in
metallic ores.

L. 28. libre de chaîne. Chaîne ought to have taken an s. But then
it would not have rhymed for the eye.

L. 34, les sables brûlants. See note to p. 61 l. 19.

L. 37. nonchalant du terme. This use of nonchalant de shows Chénier
to have been familiar with Montaigne, in whose writings it occurs
frequently, e.g. ‘Je veux… que la mort me trouve plantant mes choulx,
mais nonchalant d’elle,’ I. xix. Nonchalant = non + chalant, pres.
part. of chaloir (Lat. calere, to be hot, hence, desire ardently),
an obsolescent verb now only used impersonally in the third person
singular of the present indicative: ‘Il ne me chaut de cela.’