Candide

There lived in Westphalia, in the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh, a young boy so gentle and candid that he was named accordingly, and who listened with childlike faith to the lessons of his tutor Pangloss. The latter taught that everything is necessarily for the best end in the best of all possible worlds—noses were made to wear spectacles, legs to be shod, and pigs to be eaten. Candide thought Miss Cunégonde extremely beautiful, the castle extremely grand, and the world extremely well-made. A kiss behind a screen was enough to bring this paradise crashing down: the baron caught them in the act, kicked Candide out of doors with great force, and Cunégonde was slapped by her mother.

There he was, walking in the snow, chilled to the bone, penniless, weeping toward the heavens. Two recruiters in blue caught him at the door of a tavern, made him drink to the health of the King of the Bulgarians, clapped him in irons, and sent him off to the regiment. Thirty strokes of the cane the first day, twenty the next, ten the third: he was declared a prodigy. When he took it into his head to go for a stroll, he was caught and given the choice between running the gauntlet thirty-six times or twelve bullets to the brain. He chose the gauntlet, and his skin was flayed from the nape of his neck to his backside before the King, passing by, granted him a pardon. Then came war: the cannons, the bayonets, the burned villages, the disemboweled women, the old men riddled with wounds watching everything they had left in the world die. Candide, trembling like a philosopher, fled across heaps of the dead.

In Holland, a good Anabaptist named Jacques took him in, fed him, and gave him work. The next day, Candide recognized beneath pustules, dead eyes, and a twisted mouth, his dear Pangloss, ravaged by the pox, who informed him that Cunégonde had been raped and disemboweled by the Bulgarians, the baron killed, the baroness hacked to pieces, and the castle razed. Candide fainted. Jacques had Pangloss treated—which cost him only an eye and an ear—and set sail with both of them for Lisbon. In a tempest, Jacques drowned while saving a sailor who let him perish without so much as a backward glance. Pangloss prevented Candide from jumping into the water by proving to him that the bay had been formed expressly for the Anabaptist to drown in it. The ship was torn apart; Pangloss and Candide were carried on a plank to the shore.

Scarcely had they set foot in Lisbon when the earth shook, the sea rose, houses collapsed, and thirty thousand inhabitants were crushed. Pangloss explained that there was certainly a vein of sulfur underground stretching all the way from Lima, and that all was for the best. A familiar of the Inquisition overheard him: they were arrested. To prevent the earth from quaking further, a splendid auto-da-fé was organized; one Biscayan and two Portuguese were burned, Pangloss was hanged, and Candide was flogged in cadence to the singing. The earth quaked again that very day.

An old woman took him in, nursed him, and led him to an isolated house, where, behind a veil, he was reunited with Cunégonde—alive, having survived the massacre, passed from hand to hand, and now shared between a Jew named Don Issachar and the Grand Inquisitor according to a scrupulous schedule. Don Issachar arrived and drew his dagger; Candide killed him. The Inquisitor arrived at midnight; Candide killed him too. Thus, two dead men in two minutes, including two priests, for a boy born so gentle. The old woman helped them flee on horseback to Cadiz, where Cunégonde discovered her diamonds had been stolen, and where Candide, performing the Bulgarian exercise before a general, was given command of an infantry company bound for Paraguay.

On the ship, the old woman recounted her own story, which was far worse than Cunégonde's: daughter of a Pope and a princess, betrothed to a prince who was poisoned to death, captured by corsairs, raped, sold as a slave from Morocco to Algiers, from Tunis to Constantinople, and besieged in a fort where starving Janissaries sliced off one buttock from each woman for sustenance. She had lived through plague, war, and slavery, and grown old in misery with only half a backside, yet she still loved life—that ridiculous weakness which makes us caress the serpent that devours us.

In Buenos Aires, the governor Don Fernando, who possessed so many names that one felt compelled to beat him, fell in love with Cunégonde. The old woman advised Cunégonde to marry him, and Candide to flee. With his valet Cacambo, a resourceful half-blood who had been a choirboy, sexton, sailor, monk, postman, soldier, and lackey, Candide reached the Jesuit territory of Paraguay, where he found Cunégonde's brother, now a commandant. The reunion was ecstatic—until Candide mentioned marriage: the Jesuit baron, outraged that a commoner would presume to marry a girl with seventy-two quarterings, struck him with the flat of his sword. Candide drove his own sword into his belly. Cacambo slipped the dead man's habit onto him, and they galloped off, shouting to let the reverend father colonel pass.

Among the Oreillons, Candide killed two monkeys that were chasing two naked girls, believing he was saving them: they were their lovers. The Oreillons tied them up, set the cauldron to boil, and cried out that they were going to eat a Jesuit. Cacambo proved to them that Candide was no such thing, and they were released with a thousand courtesies. Then, lost in the jungle, they let themselves be carried by a river under a vault of rocks, and emerged into a country where the roads were paved with golden carriages drawn by large red sheep, where children played quoits with emeralds and rubies, where the innkeeper burst out laughing when they tried to pay him with the pebbles from his highways, and where the inns were paid for by the government. It was Eldorado.

A hundred-and-seventy-two-year-old man explained to them that God was worshipped without prayer, that there were neither monks nor courts nor prisons, that all the inhabitants were priests, and that the king embraced his visitors. Candide and Cacambo spent a month in this bliss, but Candide could not bring himself to stay without Cunégonde. The king had a machine built for them to cross the mountains, and loaded them with one hundred and two sheep bearing gold, precious stones, and diamonds. After a hundred days' march, only two remained. Then the Dutch skipper Vanderdendur stole the last two sheep along with all their cargo, and sailed away. The judge made Candide pay ten thousand piastres for the noise he had made complaining, and another ten thousand for the court costs.

Candide sent Cacambo to ransom Cunégonde in Buenos Aires, and set sail for Europe with Martin, a poor scholar robbed by his wife, beaten by his son, abandoned by his daughter, and persecuted by preachers because they took him for a Socinian. Martin was a Manichean: he believed that God had abandoned the world to some malevolent being. From the ship, they watched a Dutch vessel sink with all its crew—it was Vanderdendur's. One red sheep surfaced. Candide saw in this proof that crime is sometimes punished; Martin replied that the innocent passengers had perished too.

In Venice, where Candide awaited Cunégonde, he did not find her, but ran into Paquette, the baroness's former maid, now a lady of the night, and Brother Giroflée, a miserable Theatine monk. He gave them money; Martin wagered they would be no happier for it, and he was right. Candide dined at the home of Senator Pococuranté, who possessed everything and enjoyed nothing, jaded by Raphael, bored by Homer, disgusted with his concertos. He then supped with six dethroned kings who had come for the Carnival of Venice, each more wretched than the last, and all having lost their kingdoms. Cacambo finally reappeared, enslaved to a deposed sultan: Cunégonde was washing dishes on the shores of the Propontis.

Candide bought Cacambo's freedom, paid the ransom for Cunégonde's brother—who had not died from the sword thrust—and was reunited with Pangloss—who had not died from the hanging. One had been sent to the galleys for bathing with a young Muslim, the other for being poorly stitched up by a surgeon who had bungled sewing up the skin of his neck. On the galley bearing them toward Constantinople, Pangloss still maintained that all was for the best, and Martin that man is equally miserable everywhere. Candide bought a small farmstead on the shores of the Propontis. Cunégonde had grown ugly, shrewish, and unbearable; Cunégonde's brother again refused the marriage and was sent back to the galleys; Paquette and Giroflée reappeared, as unhappy as before. Pangloss philosophized, Martin concluded that man is born to live in the convulsions of anxiety or the lethargy of boredom, and Candide found nothing to say in reply.

An old Turk who cultivated twenty acres with his children, and who served his visitors sherbet, oranges, and Mocha coffee, told them that he knew nothing of what was happening in Constantinople, that he had never known the name of any mufti, and that labor kept at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need. Candide, returning to his farmstead, reflected deeply. Pangloss pointed out to him once more that all their interconnected misfortunes had led them to eat candied citrons and pistachios there. Candide replied that it was well said, but that they must cultivate their garden.