老实人

A kiss cost a young man his home. The day he was thrown out of the castle, he had just been caught with his lips against his cousin's. He was booted through the door, and the only one who followed him out was his tutor, smiling, still murmuring that this was the best of all possible worlds.

Candide, or Optimism first appeared in 1759, printed secretly in Geneva under a false name; no author was listed on the title page, because the content was sharp enough to cause real trouble. It stands as the high point of the conte philosophique, the philosophical tale: more readable than a solemn polemical pamphlet, far shorter than a proper novel, and built exactly to the size of a cannonball. Voltaire, who lived until 1778, spent his life sparring in print with the Church, the crown, and the enemies of the Encyclopedie, and in this book he rounds up nearly every opponent of the Enlightenment at once: Leibniz's optimism, the Church's burnings, the pedigrees of the nobility, the slave trade of the colonies. The book was banned, burned, and translated across Europe; plenty of people denounced it, and even more read it in secret.

Half its fame rests on a closing line quoted to death; the other half rests on its relentless, absurd pacing. The book has almost no quiet transitions - something goes wrong on nearly every page, and every time it does, someone steps forward to declare the disaster, somehow, all for the best.

Candide, the hero, is a young man raised as a ward in the Baron's household, innocent to the point of being nearly blank. His first lesson in life comes from his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, who stews metaphysics, theology, cosmology, and what might be called nonsense-ology into one pot and concludes that this is the best of all possible worlds, syphilis and earthquakes included. His cousin Cunegonde, the Baron's daughter, is a plump, rosy-cheeked girl at the story's opening; she is both the spark that gets Candide thrown out and the one person he keeps thinking about for the decades that follow.

The book's world is a patchwork canvas: it sets out from a castle in Westphalia, crosses a Bulgar army camp (a jab at Prussian-style conscription), Holland, Lisbon, Paraguay, the legendary Eldorado, and ends at a small farm outside Constantinople. Voltaire crams half the globe into three hundred pages and sends Candide crashing, stop by stop, into the ugliest things Europe has to offer: war, the Inquisition, slavery. Optimist philosophy keeps showing up at the scene of the disaster, again and again.

Candide was born in the Baron's Westphalian house under slightly awkward circumstances - he is the illegitimate son of the Baron's sister - and grew up there, taught by Dr. Pangloss. One day, hidden behind a screen, he kisses his cousin Cunegonde, and the Baron catches them in the act. The Baron turns on him instantly and kicks him out the door; Pangloss is thrown out along with him. The two walk off into the snow, and the tutor, perfectly composed, insists that everything has been arranged for the best possible outcome.

Before he knows what's happening, our hero is press-ganged into the Bulgar army. The camp scene is fast and brutal: recruits beaten to a pulp during drill, a single battle burying a thousand men in the snow. Candide slips away and washes up in Holland, where he knocks on a door begging for charity. The man who answers has just finished preaching passionately about charity, and hearing Candide's story, curses him off the doorstep. Next door, a quiet Anabaptist merchant named Jacques feeds him and gives him a bed without a word of fuss. Jacques is one of the few genuinely good people in the whole book, and Voltaire keeps him deliberately silent, a contrast to a Church that talks one way and acts another.

In Holland, he is reunited with his tutor Pangloss, who has since caught syphilis, his nose partly caved in, and he brings worse news besides: the castle was stormed and burned by Bulgar troops, the Baron and his wife are both dead, and Cunegonde has met some terrible fate too. The three set sail for Lisbon. Partway there the ship runs into trouble, and Jacques dives in to save a drowning sailor - it's simply his nature. Jacques goes under; the sailor he pulled out watches him drown without so much as a shout. The ship makes land just as the great Lisbon earthquake strikes.

Tens of thousands die in the Lisbon earthquake, and the friars offer an official explanation: this is God's punishment for sin, and to calm his wrath, a few more heretics need burning. So the Inquisition builds a platform and stages a public auto-da-fe. Pangloss is sentenced to hang - the rope is botched, and by sheer luck he survives. Candide is flogged in the same chaos. The one who saves him is an old woman with an extraordinary past of her own, and she brings him news that Cunegonde is still alive.

On the way to finding Cunegonde, Candide kills for the first time - he runs through both the Jewish merchant and the Grand Inquisitor who have been sharing her, and frees her. His newly hired servant Cacambo is sharp and capable, the one person in the whole book who stays reliable from start to finish. With Cacambo and Cunegonde in tow, Candide flees in a panic to South America.

In the Jesuit territory of Paraguay, Candide runs into his brother-in-law-to-be, the young Baron, Cunegonde's brother, a man obsessed with pedigree. The two of them explode into a fight over the marriage, and the young Baron spits that Candide's blood isn't good enough. Furious, Candide stabs him. The two parts of the story split there: Candide and Cacambo push deeper inland and, by sheer accident, stumble into the legendary Eldorado.

Eldorado is the book's one utopia: the roads are paved with gold, the walls are gilded, children toss gold nuggets into the water like toys because nobody there thinks anything of them. More to the point, there is no Church, no courts, no religious persecution. Voltaire spends a whole chapter on a place where a person can live without much suffering. And after some time there, Candide makes a choice that makes you wince: still thinking of Cunegonde, he loads up a sack of gold and jewels and walks out of paradise of his own free will, to keep searching the world for a cousin whose face, by now, has long since lost its bloom.

In Surinam, reality slaps Candide hard. Everyone he meets outside Eldorado turns out to be a swindler or a bandit, and the wealth he carries out of that lost paradise becomes open bait that nearly gets him killed. It's there that he meets Martin, a down-and-out scholar convinced the world runs on evil. Martin has been cheated in turn by his wife, his son, and a Dutch merchant, and now assumes the worst of everything.

Martin isn't a throwaway character. Pangloss represents Leibnizian optimism, the idea that everything is good; Martin is its mirror opposite, the idea that the world runs on evil. Candide is squeezed between them, and Voltaire uses the two men as fixed poles, jolting his hero back and forth the whole way through. What I admire most here is that Voltaire never lets Candide settle fully into either camp - he just keeps stumbling between the two brands of nonsense.

After circling most of the globe, Candide finally buys Cunegonde's freedom just outside Constantinople. The reunion is nothing like a romance: the cousin he has pined after for decades is now haggard and bad-tempered, and complains far more than she thanks him. Pangloss and the young Baron turn up too, in due course - yes, the tutor didn't quite die that first time, and the knife wound didn't finish off the young Baron either; he'd since been sold into a galley and was bought free. The whole group, along with the old woman, Cacambo, and Martin, crowds onto a small farm to live out their days.

The running gap between claim and reality is the book's sharpest tool. Every time Pangloss declares that something has worked out for the best, the next page delivers a more absurd disaster - syphilis, earthquake, the stake, slavery - and it's the cold clash between the two that gives Candide its real voice. Voltaire almost never lets the text step forward and shout its point; he just lays the facts out and lets the reader do the laughing.

As subject matter, it stews together the institutional evils of Enlightenment Europe all at once: Leibnizian metaphysical optimism is empty, the Inquisition's burnings are a sham, aristocratic pedigree is nonsense, and colonial slavery is naked plunder. The book's small, decent characters - the Anabaptist merchant Jacques, the mixed-race servant Cacambo - turn out to be the rare honest people in a world gone to pieces.

A companion piece like this can tell you what happens in the plot and what Voltaire is aiming his fire at. What it can't give you is the feeling of getting slapped on every page turn, that cold, fast French rhythm that never lingers, sentences arriving one after another like icicles. The original runs just over three hundred pages; you can finish a chapter before bed, and that one chapter packs in more disaster than plenty of today's full-length novels manage in their entirety. And then there's that closing line, quoted for nearly three hundred years now - read it yourself. No summary does it justice.