[L. 93.] mobiles. The epithet will be more easily understood if we think of its contrary, 'inert'.
[L. 98.] j'étais misérable... Misérable is here used in the sense 'to be pitied,' a sense frequent in the seventeenth century. j'étais, the imperfect of the indicative for the conditional past, as in 'Hercule, ce dit-il, tu devois bien purger La terre de cette hydre,' La Fontaine, Fables, VIII. v, or in 'Sans vous, j'étais noyé.'
[L. 100.] N'eussiez. The more usual French construction would be, with repetition of the subject, 'vous n'eussiez.' armé... les pierres et les cris. A favourite phrase with Chénier (see p. 112, l. 105, and in Le Jeu de Paume, 'La tyrannie... arme... ses cent yeux...'). Racine, Les Frères Ennemis, I. iii, speaks of 'armer et le fer et la faim' against someone. An old translation of the Bible has 'J'armerai contre eux les dents des bêtes farouches,' Deut. xxxii. 24. Thus in the Odyssey, when the 'mastiffs' fly at Ulysses, the herdsman runs up, and 'his cry (with frequent stones flung at the dogs) repell'd this way and that their eager course they held.'—Chapman, Odyss. xiv. ll. 49-51.
[L. 110.] Ma bouche ne s'est point ouverte à leur répondre. See note to p. 3, l. 88.
[L. 119.] place is, of course, a subjunctive. The omission of que before subjunctives expressing a wish was the rule in Old French. The practice was still prevalent in seventeenth-century French. It is exceptional now, as in: Fasse le ciel! Puissiez-vous réussir! Vive la France!
[Ll. 119-121.] Un siège... sous la colonne. Cf. Odyss. (Chapman's transl., viii. p. 365): 'His place was given him in a chair all graced With silver studs, and 'gainst a pillar placed;... The herald on a pin above his head His soundful harp hung.'
[L. 123.] Ingénieux, here, seems to be used, not in its French sense of 'clever, having an aptitude for invention,' which would be but a poor compliment paid to the great Homer, but with its Latin meaning of 'gifted with genius.'
[L. 135.] vaillant. I take it to mean, not 'courageous,' but 'vigorous in body, robust, able-bodied,' a sense not recorded in Littré, though well known in everyday French, the sense of English valiant in 'the sturdy and valiant beggars' of the statute-book.
[L. 140.] douleurs, rheumatic pains.
[Ll. 149-156.] E. Faguet, in his Chénier, observes how like a picture this is composed. In the foreground the blind man sitting under a tree, with the shepherds and wayfarers pressing around him, while the background displays the deserted flocks and roads, and the intervening space is crowded with the attentive nymphs and sylvans enticed out of their abodes.