[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.
VII. L'ART, DES TRANSPORTS DE L'ÂME...
[L. 2.] Cf. Boileau: 'C'est peu d'être poète; il faut être amoureux'; and Musset: 'Tu te frappais le front en lisant Lamartine. Ah! frappe-toi le coeur; c'est là qu'est le génie.' Cf. also Milton: 'Poetry should be simple, sensuous, and passionate.'