Candide

Voltaire published Candide anonymously in 1759, the year after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 had shaken Europe's faith in a benevolent order of things. The "optimism" the book mocks is a popularised version of the philosophy of Leibniz, who argued that God, being perfect, must have created the best of all possible worlds. This retelling follows Voltaire's revised text of 1761 and keeps his thirty chapters, each condensed.

CANDIDE, OR OPTIMISM

Translated from the German of Doctor Ralph, with the additions found in the Doctor's pocket when he died at Minden, in the year of grace 1759.

1. How Candide was brought up in a fine castle, and how he was driven out of it

In Westphalia, in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, there lived a young man whom nature had given the gentlest of manners. He had fairly sound judgment and a very simple mind, which is why, I believe, he was called Candide. The old servants suspected he was the son of the Baron's sister by a worthy gentleman of the neighbourhood, whom she had refused to marry because he could prove only seventy-one quarterings of nobility.

The Baron was one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia, for his castle had a door and windows. The Baroness, who weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, commanded great respect for that reason. Their daughter Cunégonde was rosy, fresh and very pretty. The tutor Pangloss was the oracle of the house, and taught metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology.

"It is demonstrable," he said, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are. Since everything was made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Noses were made to carry spectacles, and so we have spectacles. Legs were plainly designed for breeches, and we have breeches. Pigs were made to be eaten, and we eat pork all year round. Those who say all is well talk nonsense: they should say all is for the best."

Candide believed it all innocently. He thought that after the happiness of being born Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh, the second was to be Mademoiselle Cunégonde, the third to see her every day, and the fourth to hear Doctor Pangloss, the greatest philosopher in the province and therefore in the world.

One day Cunégonde, walking in the little wood, saw Doctor Pangloss among the bushes giving a lesson in experimental physics to her mother's chambermaid, and went home thoughtful, wishing to be learned too. The next day, behind a screen, she dropped her handkerchief; Candide picked it up; she took his hand; he kissed hers; their lips met. The Baron passed by the screen and, seeing this cause and this effect, drove Candide out of the castle with great kicks to the backside. Cunégonde fainted, and all was consternation in the finest of all possible castles.

2. What became of Candide among the Bulgars

Candide walked a long time, weeping, and slept in a furrow in the snow. In the next town two men in blue invited him to dinner, admired his height, and asked him to drink the health of the King of the Bulgars. He drank. "That is enough," they said. "You are now the support, the defender, the hero of the Bulgars." They put him in irons and taught him to drill, with blows of the stick.

One fine spring day he took it into his head to go for a walk, believing it the privilege of the human species to use its legs as it pleased. He was caught, and given the choice of running the gauntlet thirty-six times through the regiment or being shot. He protested that the will is free and he wanted neither; he had to choose. By virtue of the gift of God called liberty, he chose the gauntlet, endured it twice, and begged to be shot instead. At that moment the King passed by, learned that the prisoner was a young metaphysician ignorant of the world, and pardoned him with a clemency that will be praised in every newspaper and every age.

3. How Candide escaped from the Bulgars, and what became of him

Nothing could be so fine as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, drums and cannon made a harmony such as was never heard in hell. The cannon knocked down about six thousand men on each side; the musketry removed from the best of worlds some nine or ten thousand rascals infesting its surface; the bayonet was the sufficient reason for the death of some thousands more. Candide, trembling like a philosopher, hid during this heroic butchery, and while both kings had a Te Deum sung, he went off to reason about causes and effects elsewhere.

He passed through burned villages, each destroyed by the other side according to the laws of war, and reached Holland, where he had heard everyone was rich and Christian. A preacher who had just spoken an hour on charity asked him whether he believed the Pope was the Antichrist. "I have never heard so," said Candide, "but whether he is or not, I have no bread." The preacher's wife emptied a chamber pot on his head. An Anabaptist named Jacques, who had never been baptised, took him home, fed him and gave him work. The next day Candide met a beggar covered in sores, with his nose half eaten away, who spat out a tooth with every cough.

4. How Candide met his old master Pangloss, and what came of it

The beggar was Pangloss. The Bulgars had destroyed the castle, killed the Baron and Baroness, and done violence to Cunégonde and slit her belly; she was dead. Candide fainted. When he came to, he asked what had reduced his master to this state.

"Love," said Pangloss. "You knew Paquette, the Baroness's maid. In her arms I tasted the delights of paradise, which have produced these torments of hell. She had it from a Franciscan, who had it from a countess, who had it from a cavalry captain, and so back to one of the companions of Christopher Columbus."

"What a strange genealogy! Is not the devil at the root of it?"

"Not at all. It was a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds. If Columbus had not caught this disease in America, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal."

The good Jacques had Pangloss cured at his own expense — he lost only an eye and an ear — and took both philosophers with him to Lisbon. On the voyage Jacques argued that men must have corrupted nature a little, since God gave them neither cannon nor bayonets and they had made both. "All that was indispensable," said Pangloss. "Private misfortunes make up the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more all is well." As he spoke, the sky darkened, and a terrible storm broke within sight of Lisbon.

5. Storm, shipwreck, earthquake

A brutal sailor struck the Anabaptist and was himself flung overboard; Jacques pulled him back and fell into the sea himself, and the sailor let him drown. Candide wanted to jump in after him; Pangloss stopped him, proving that the harbour of Lisbon had been made expressly for this Anabaptist to drown in. The ship split, and everyone perished except Pangloss, Candide and the sailor.

Hardly had they set foot in Lisbon when the earth shook. The sea boiled up in the harbour, houses fell, and thirty thousand people were crushed under the ruins. The sailor went looting, got drunk, and bought the favours of a girl among the dying. Candide, wounded by falling stones, begged for a little wine and oil. "This earthquake is nothing new," said Pangloss. "There must be a vein of sulphur running underground from Lima to Lisbon." That evening he consoled the survivors: "All this is for the very best. For if there is a volcano at Lisbon, it could not be anywhere else." A little man in black, a familiar of the Inquisition, asked politely whether the gentleman did not believe in original sin.

6. How a fine auto-da-fé was held to prevent earthquakes, and how Candide was flogged

After the earthquake, the wise men of the country decided that the spectacle of a few people burned slowly with great ceremony is an infallible secret for keeping the earth from shaking. So they arrested a Biscayan who had married his child's godmother, two Portuguese who had taken the bacon off a chicken, and Pangloss and Candide — the one for speaking, the other for listening with an air of approval. A week later they marched in paper mitres. Candide was flogged in time to the singing; the Biscayan and the two Portuguese were burned; Pangloss was hanged, though that is not the custom. The same day the earth shook again.

"If this is the best of possible worlds," said Candide to himself, "what are the others like?" As he stood there, flogged, absolved and blessed, an old woman came up and said: "Take courage, my son, and follow me."

7. How an old woman took care of Candide, and how he found what he loved

She took him to a hovel, gave him ointment, food and clean clothes, and on the third evening led him to a house among gardens. There she brought in a trembling, veiled woman glittering with jewels. Candide lifted the veil. It was Cunégonde. He fell at her feet; she fell on the sofa.

"You are alive! Then you were not violated? Your belly was not slit open, as Pangloss assured me?"