[L. 44.] L'astre, the sun, or Phoebus Apollo.
[L. 92.] De leur voix argentine. 'The silvery voice of glasses' is pretty. André Chénier is depicting a true heathenish paradise.
[L. 98.] ingrat à. We should rather say now ingrat envers. Many adjectives, Haase observes (§ 125 B), now followed by envers, pour, avec, de, &c., were constructed with à, e.g. 'A moins que d'être ingrate à mon libérateur.'—Corneille, Andr. v. 2, 1573.
[L. 97.] Qu'à ton tour... May, in return for thy ingratitude, the fair one...
[L. 102.] Ne t'ait vu de sa vie. May she pretend that she never saw you before.
V.
M. Dezeimeris (Leçons diverses et remarques sur le texte de divers auteurs) has shown that Chénier, in this elegy, had borrowed not a few hints from Ausonius, Epistola X.
[L. 1.] solitaires divines. Which is the noun, which the adjective? Solitaire must be the noun (though certain critics have expressed the opinion that it is divine which is the noun). Firstly, there is the masculine noun 'un solitaire,' and it is hard to see why there should not be a feminine, 'une solitaire.' Secondly, the subsequent lines show that Chénier addresses the Muses as lovers of solitude, and it is more logical that the predominant idea should be embodied in the noun, not in the epithet.
[L. 3.] Nîme. Nîmes (earlier Nismes), in the dep. Gard. The final s has been dropped to admit the elision of the e. 'Nîmes égare' would have sounded most unnatural.
[L. 5.] aux bords de Loire. The omission of the definite article before Loire and Garonne is archaic. It was the current practice in the sixteenth century, and still occurs occasionally in the seventeenth.—Haase, § 3 B. It is to be noticed that in the next line Chénier writes 'ces nymphes du Rhône,' and, in fact, the omission of le before Rhône seems hardly possible. It is difficult to account for such anomalies. A few individual relics of former usage have thus survived. One of these is the phrase 'entre Sambre et Meuse.'