Candide (3 page)

Another explanation for Voltaire’s reticence about his philosophical tales is his understandable if mistaken belief that these were relatively inconsequential productions belonging to the much decried and maligned genre of the novel, and that they would not fare well with future readers, especially when considered alongside his far more ambitious and serious works—his tragedies, epic and philosophical poems, and historical essays. Whatever Voltaire’s own motives or thinking about
Candide
may have been, there is a persistent but erroneous legend that he dashed off by dictation the thirty chapters of the tale in three days. It is of course far more likely that he wrote
Candide
over a ten-month period in 1758 and completed the manuscript, with final revisions and additions, in the fall of that year.

The slender book first came off the presses of the brothers Cramer, publishers in Geneva, in January 1759. It was promptly disseminated and repeatedly republished in Paris and elsewhere. Even though it was swiftly condemned by both French and Swiss authorities, and copies were seized in printing shops in Paris and Geneva, it sold briskly under the counters. No official effort to suppress
Candide
could prevent it from becoming one of the most sensational forbidden best-sellers of pre-Revolutionary France and indeed Europe. Within a year, there were at least three English translations and one edition in Italian.

In 1758 the sixty-four-year-old Voltaire had personally experienced an unusually vast range of human situations and emotions, and he had become keenly aware of the existence of evil, unhappiness, and injustice in this world. He had also come to the realization that there were no satisfactory theological or philosophical explanations to justify or account for the horrors that so persistently dog humankind.

He had acquired an enormous intellectual and multicultural frame of reference thanks to his unquenchable intellectual curiosity, through his omnivorous reading, and especially through his extensive research for his historical works and philosophical essays. He was now at the height of his powers and in full possession of his craft as a writer who over the decades had tirelessly practiced, perfected, and mastered all the literary genres and rhetorical techniques and devices.

The reasons for
Candide
’s immediate and enduring success with readers are many. It is a supremely wrought tragicomedy that slyly and irresistibly induces us to laugh at and simultaneously reflect upon the most dreadful events that befall humankind. It appeals to us today because, nearly 250 years after its publication, it has lost none of its relevance or satirical sting. It is particularly modern and pertinent because its dark cosmic vision is essentially in keeping with our own awareness of what separates our need for order, clarity, and rationality from the brutal reality of a chaotic world.

The fiercely relentless attack
Candide
unleashes against the evils of religious fanaticism, war, colonialism, slavery, and mass atrocities is more relevant than ever. The naive, young hero of the tale obstinately seeks personal happiness in a world beleaguered by all kinds of catastrophes wrought by the blind, unleashed forces of nature—such as earthquakes and epidemic diseases—as well as by violent, destructive human passions.

The tale opens with a kind of idyll that revisits in a parodic and rococo mode themes originally brought to life in the Garden of Eden. The castle in Westphalia, which belongs to the proud baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, and its incongruous inhabitants are for the gentle and innocent Candide a paradise from which he is suddenly and brutally expelled when he is caught kissing Cunégonde, the baron’s daughter, a pleasingly plump, wholesome, and docile young woman.

A gentle, honest, and appealingly naive young man, reputed to be the illegitimate offspring of the sister of the baron Thunder-ten-tronckh and an honorable nobleman whom she refused to marry because of his insufficiently ancient lineage, Candide is the eager and wide-eyed disciple of his pedantic tutor Pangloss, who relentlessly lectures to him on “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology,” a comic formula of Voltaire’s invention meant to ridicule Leibniz’s philosophical optimism.

Throughout the dreadful catastrophes that will befall Candide, Pangloss, and their companions in misery, Pangloss will obstinately and blindly stick to his unshakable belief that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”

Upon being summarily kicked out of the baron’s castle, Candide is immediately plunged into an incomprehensible and unpredictable world ruled by overwhelmingly powerful and evil forces, both natural and human. Forcibly impressed into the army of the king of the Bulgars, he witnesses all the horrors of war in a fierce battle between the Bulgars and the Abares from which he barely escapes with his life. While the kings of the two opposing armies were having solemn “Te Deums” sung, each of his own camp, Candide fled this “heroic butchery” that left behind not only heaps of dead and dying soldiers on the battlefield, but also surrounding villages in ashes, their inhabitants savagely massacred. Candide is befriended by James the Anabaptist, and also unexpectedly meets Dr. Pangloss, by now reduced to the pitiful state of a beggar grossly disfigured by syphilis. This motley group starts for Lisbon, and their ship is wrecked in a terrible storm off the coast of Portugal. James is drowned, while Candide and Pangloss barely manage to reach the shore of Portugal just as an earthquake shakes its capital, crushing 30,000 inhabitants under the ruins and engulfing what is left of the city in the flames and ashes of terrible fires.

In order to punish those judged wicked enough to have caused this disaster and to prevent other earthquakes from occurring, the rulers of Lisbon treat the people to the spectacle of a splendid
auto
-
da
-
fé
. While Pangloss is hanged, Candide is whipped to within an inch of his life. A charitable old woman takes care of him and leads him to Cunégonde; the damsel had barely survived being raped and stabbed in her father’s castle, and has since become the mistress of Don Issachar, who is a Jew, and the Grand Inquisitor, both of whom Candide finds himself obliged to kill as threatening rivals when they discover him in a compromising situation with the young woman. As a result, the lovers, accompanied by the old woman, flee to Cadiz, where they embark for Paraguay. During the lengthy sea voyage, the old woman, who happens to be the daughter of Pope Urban X and the Princess of Palestrina, relates her own sad story, filled with multiple bloody adventures and calamities in the course of which she was raped, sold into slavery, stricken with the plague, had one of her buttocks cut off, was sent to Russia where she fell to the lot of a boyard who gave her twenty lashes per day, and ended up becoming a servant of Don Issachar and assigned to Cunégonde.

After the ship lands in Buenos Aires, our passengers are the guests of the Governor, who promptly develops a mad and jealous infatuation with Cunégonde. Once more, Candide has to leave behind his beloved and flee for his life, this time in the company of Cacambo, a recently acquired valet, part Spanish and part South American Indian, who had himself acquired a rich and variegated experience of life. Arriving in Paraguay, Candide meets the Commandant of the Jesuits, who turns out to be Cunégonde’s brother; he has also somehow survived the massacre in his father’s castle and has since become a Jesuit priest and a colonel in the King of Spain’s troops. However, upon learning of Candide’s intention of marrying his sister, he becomes enraged and draws his sword, and in the ensuing violent fight Candide has to stab him in self-defense.

Believing he has killed Cunégonde’s brother, Candide (with Cacambo in tow) promptly takes to the road again, rescues two young girls amorously pursued by monkeys, and is captured by the Oreillons, a tribe of cannibalistic Indians with a special liking for Jesuit flesh; the two are freed when the resourceful Cacambo persuades the Indians that his master, far from being a Jesuit, has just killed one. Pursuing their journey, Candide and Cacambo painfully reach the isolated country of El Dorado, surrounded by nearly impassable mountains and precipices, and find themselves in a utopian society that, as an enlightened monarchy, offers its subjects the abundant fruits of its natural riches, as well as peace, prosperity, liberty, tolerance, and justice. After two months in this happy retreat, Candide becomes restless and decides to resume his travels and his quest for his beloved Cunégonde. He and Cacambo set out with a hundred sheep, plentiful provision, and huge amounts of gold, diamond, and other precious stones. However, after a hundred days of strenuous travel, only two sheep survive. In Surinam, a Dutch colony, they encounter an African slave missing his left leg and right hand, the result of the barbaric treatment he has incurred while working in the sugar mills of his master. “It is at this cost that you eat sugar in Europe,” is his sad comment.

Trying in vain to rejoin Cunégonde, the too-trusting Candide is promptly swindled out of most of his possessions. In order to have a better chance at rescuing Cunégonde, Candide sends the more worldy-wise Cacambo to Buenos Aires and he plans to await them in Venice. He sets sail for Bordeaux in the hope of reaching his destination by way of Paris, after having selected as a traveling companion an impoverished scholar named Martin, who has also been the victim of many misfortunes and who, as a Manichaeist, is the pessimistic counterpart of Pangloss. In Paris, Candide is introduced into high society, with its fine suppers, slanderous gossip, and gambling at cards. Arrested as a suspicious foreigner, he buys his freedom with some of his diamonds from El Dorado and is shipped off to Portsmouth, England, where he witnesses the summary execution of Admiral Byng. From Portsmouth, Candide proceeds to Venice, where he encounters Paquette, Cunégonde’s maid, and Cacambo, who informs him that Cunegonde is in Constantinople. In Venice, he is the guest of Senator Pococuranté, a wealthy Venetian nobleman whose social privileges and riches have made him a complete disbeliever in the ultimate value of all cultural and literary achievements.

In the Venetian galley that carries Candide to Constantinople, where he hopes to reunite with his beloved Cunégonde, Candide unexpectedly finds Pangloss and Cunégonde’s brother among the galley slaves. He is informed that Pangloss survived his hanging in Lisbon because of a bungled knot and that Cunégonde’s brother survived his wound, which had not been fatal after all. When Candide and his companions arrive in Constantinople, they buy Cunégonde and the old woman from their masters. By then, however, Cunégonde has lost her good looks, but Candide feels he cannot go back on his word, while her brother obstinately persists in his objections, which can only be overcome by having him sent back to complete his stint as a galley slave.

Upon arriving in Constantinople, Candide purchases a little farm, but after having survived so many disasters the little group cannot at first easily settle into a calm, uneventful existence. Pangloss still tries to lecture his erstwhile disciple, but the latter interrupts the learned doctor with the simple, pragmatic, and ultimately hopeful observation that “we must cultivate our garden.” In other words, life is made bearable by useful activity rather than by idle theorizing.

To summarize the plot of
Candide
is of course to leave out what makes it one of the great masterpieces of satirical and comical literature. It is a fast-paced adventure story and travelogue, an unsentimental love story, a fantasy replete with history. Comic effects are generally achieved by the staccato rhythm of the narration, by the jarring contrast between the dramatic content and the coolly dispassionate style, and by the absence of any psychological depth for the major characters of the tale, which makes them like marionettes, manipulated at will by their creator.

While it is a ferocious attack on philosophical optimism,
Candide
is not a pessimistic work, for it proclaims the human capacity to survive the worst calamities and to endure and even prosper in a world replete with war, cruelty, misery, persecution, and religious intolerance.

I
n the country of Westphalia,
^a
in the castle of the most noble baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, lived a youth whom nature had endowed with a most sweet disposition. His face was the true index of his mind. He had a solid judgment joined to the most unaffected simplicity; and hence, I presume, he had his name of Candide. The old servants of the house suspected him to have been the son of the baron’s sister by a very good sort of a gentleman of the neighbourhood, whom that young lady refused to marry, because he could produce no more than seventy-one quarterings
^Ɨ
in his arms, the rest of the genealogical tree belonging to the family having been lost through the injuries of time.

The baron was one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia, for his castle had not only a gate, but even windows, and his great hall was hung with tapestry. He used to hunt with his mastiffs and spaniels instead of greyhounds; his groom served him for huntsman, and the parson of the parish officiated as his grand almoner. He was called “My Lord” by all his people, and everyone laughed at his stories.