by Voltaire
19. The great Lisbon earthquake and fire occurred on November 1, 1755; between 30,000 and 40,000 deaths resulted.
20. The Japanese, originally receptive to foreign visitors, grew fearful that priests and proselytizers were merely advance agents of empire and expelled both the Portuguese and the Spanish early in the 17th century. Only the Dutch were allowed to retain a small foothold, under humiliating conditions, of which the notion of stamping on the crucifix is symbolic. It was never what Voltaire suggests here, an actual requirement for entering the country.
21. Specifically, a familier or poursuivant, an undercover agent with powers of arrest.
22. Literally, “act of faith,” a public ceremony of repentance and humiliation. Such an auto-da-fé was actually held in Lisbon, June 20, 1756.
23. The Biscayan’s fault lay in marrying someone within the forbidden bounds of relationship, an act of spiritual incest. The men who declined pork or bacon were understood to be crypto-Jews.
24. The cone-shaped paper cap (intended to resemble a bishop’s miter) and flowing yellow cape were customary garb for those pleading before the Inquisition.
25. In fact, the second quake occurred December 21, 1755.
26. The fiftieth Psalm in the Vulgate (Latin) Bible begins with the word Miserere (have mercy); it is fittingly included among the penitential psalms. “Plainsong”: a particularly unadorned form of medieval music.
27. Spanish horses, proverbially swift and strong.
28. A semireligious order with police powers, very active in 18th-century Spain.
29. Actually, Colonia del Sacramento. Voltaire took great interest in the Jesuit role in Paraguay, which he has much oversimplified and largely misrepresented here in the interests of his satire. In 1750 they did, however, offer armed resistance to an agreement made between Spain and Portugal. They were subdued and expelled in 1769.
30. Voltaire left behind a comment on this passage, a note first published in 1829: “Note the extreme discretion of the author: hitherto there has never been a pope named Urban X; he avoided attributing a bastard to a known pope. What circumspection! what an exquisite conscience!”
31. About halfway between Rome and Naples.
32. A seaport town in Morocco.
33. Literally, when at the point of death. Absolution from a corsair in the act of murdering one is of very dubious validity.
34. Having reigned for more than 50 years, a potent and ruthless sultan of Morocco, he died in 1727 and left his kingdom in much the condition described.
35. “Oh what a misfortune to have no testicles!”
36. The castrato Farinelli (1705–82), originally a singer, came to exercise considerable political influence on the kings of Spain, Philip V and Ferdinand VI.
37. Azov, near the mouth of the Don, was besieged by the Russians under Peter the Great in 1695–96. “Aga”: or agha; in Muslim countries, a military commander about equivalent to a major. “Janizaries”: slaves, prisoners, or captured Christians who served the sultan as an elite group of mercenary soldiers.
38. The Roman name of the so-called Sea of Azov, a shallow swampy lake near the town.
39. In effect, a chaplain.
40. What Voltaire has in mind here was an ineffectual conspiracy against Peter the Great known as the “revolt of the strelitz” or musketeers, which took place in 1698. Though easily put down, it provoked from the emperor a massive and atrocious program of reprisals. “Boyar”: a class of petty Russian nobility.
41. Johann Robeck (1672–1739) published a treatise advocating suicide and showed his conviction by drowning himself. But he waited till he was 67 before putting his theory to the test. For a larger view of the issue, see L. C. Crocker, “The Discussion of Suicide in the 18th Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952): 47–72.
42. Voltaire has in mind Abraham’s adventures with Sarah (Genesis 12) and Isaac’s with Rebecca (Genesis 26).
43. Police officers accompanying a mayor, or royal official.
44. A city and province of Argentina, to the northwest of Buenos Aires, just at the juncture of the Andes and the Grand Chaco.
45. The Jesuit fathers. R. B. Cunningham-Grahame has written an account of the Jesuits in Paraguay 1607–1767, under the title A Vanished Arcadia.
46. In fact, the Jesuits, who had organized their Indian parishes into villages under a system of tribal communism, did their best to discourage contact with the outside world.
47. In this passage and several later ones, Voltaire uses in conjunction two words, both of which mean humming bird. The French system of classifying humming birds, based on the work of the celebrated Buffon, distinguishes oiscaux-mouches with straight bills from colibris with curved bills. This distinction is wholly fallacious. Humming birds have all manner of shaped bills, and the division of species must be made on other grounds entirely. At the expense of ornithological accuracy, I have therefore introduced birds of paradise to get the requisite sense of glitter and sheen.
48. It is the name of a Jesuit rector at Colmar with whom Voltaire had quarreled in 1754.
49. A journal published by the Jesuit order, founded in 1701 and consistently hostile to Voltaire.
50. Hybrid creatures of mythology, half-animal, half-human.
51. Voltaire’s name is “Oreillons” from Spanish “Orejones,” a name mentioned in Garcilaso de Vega’s Historia General del Perú (1609), on which Voltaire drew for many of the details in his picture of South America. See Richard A. Brooks, “Voltaire and Garcilaso de Vega,” Studies in Voltaire and the 18th Century 30:189–204.
52. The myth of this land of gold somewhere in Central or South America had been widespread since the 16th century.
53. This journey down an underground river is probably adapted from a similar episode in the story of Sinbad the Sailor.
54. Echoes a famous tag from Horace’s Art of Poetry 343, “miscere utile dulci.” The Eldorardan landscape is like a well-composed humanist poem.
55. Or Meknes, in North Africa. Its horses are Berber steeds, swift as or even swifter than Spanish stallions. The sheep of Eldorado come from Voltaire’s reading of travelers’ tales; we know them now as llamas and alpacas.
56. Training in contempt for precious metals and gemstones was a conspicuous feature of the Utopian society imagined by Sir Thomas More (1516).
57. Cacambo’s linguistic skills are an obvious joke: even in Peru there is no Peruvian language, and in Tucuman, which is a province of Argentina, they speak Spanish predominantly.
58. Voltaire’s imaginary South America owes this special feature partly to his anticlericalism, partly to his readings about Quaker customs in Pennsylvania. Without a Catholic hierarchy, he supposed, people would be more natural in their feelings, hence more generous toward visitors.
59. The Discovery of Guiana, published in 1595, described Sir Walter Raleigh’s infatuation with the myth of Eldorado and served to spread the story across Europe.
60. Candide’s questions may be related to those of Gulliver on a somewhat similar occasion; see Gulliver’s Travels, book 4.
61. A name intended to suggest Van Duren, a Dutch bookseller with whom Voltaire had quarreled.
62. The story of European mistreatment of slaves on the sugar plantations—apart from being basically true—reached Voltaire through the treatise De L’Esprit by Helvetius (1758).
63. The business of jacking up one’s price in the middle of a bargain points directly at the bookseller Van Duren, to whom Voltaire had successively offered 1,000, 1,500, 2,000, and 3,000 florins for the return of the manuscript of Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel.
64. A follower of Faustus and Laelius
Socinus, 16th-century Polish theologians, who proposed a form of “rational” Christianity that exalted the rational conscience and minimized such mysteries as the trinity. The Socinians, by a special irony, were vigorous optimists. But in Voltaire’s day, “Socinian” was used mostly as a loose term of theological abuse.
65. Mani, a Persian mage and philosopher of the 3rd century C.E., taught (probably under the influence of traditions stemming from Zoroaster and the worshipers of the sun god Mithra) that the earth is a field of dispute between two almost equal powers, one of light and one of darkness, both of which must be propitiated. Saint Augustine was much exercised by the heresy, to which he was at one time himself addicted, and Voltaire came to some knowledge of it through the encyclopedic learning of the 17th-century scholar Pierre Bayle.
66. Martin claims to be a Manichee, but this snappy formula closely parallels a dictum of Cicero’s, De Natura Deorum 3.37.
67. The Jansenists, a sect of strict Catholics, became notorious for spiritual ecstasies. Their public displays reached a height during the 1720s, and Voltaire described them in Le Siècle de Louis XIV (chap. 37), as well as in the article on “Convulsions” in the Philosophical Dictionary. Voltaire’s older brother, Armand Arouet, was for a while an associate of the convulsionaries.
68. The Bible. Voltaire is straining at a dark passage in Genesis 1.
69. The satire is pointed at Maupertuis Le Lapon, philosopher and mathematician, whom Voltaire had accused of trying to adduce mathematical proofs of the existence of God and whose algebraic formulae were easily ridiculed.
70. A district on the left bank, notably grubby in the 18th century, “ ‘As I entered [Paris] through the Faubourg Saint Marceau, I saw nothing but dirty stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of squalor and poverty, beggars, carters, menders of clothes, sellers of herb-drinks and old hats.’ Rousseau, Confessions, Book IV.”
71. In the middle of the 18th century, it became customary to require persons who were grievously ill to sign billets de confession, without which they could not be given absolution, admitted to the last sacraments, or buried in consecrated ground.
72. Descartes proposed certain ideas as innate; Voltaire followed Locke in categorically denying innate ideas. The point is simply that in faction fights all the issues get muddled together.
73. Here begins a long passage interpolated by Voltaire in 1761; it ends here.
74. Le Comte d’Essex by Thomas Corneille.
75. Voltaire engaged in a long and vigorous campaign against the rule that actors could not be buried in consecrated ground. The superstition probably arose from a feeling that by assuming false identities they denied their own souls.
76. Adrienne Lecouvreur (1690–1730), so called because she made her debut as Monime in Racine’s Mithridate. Voltaire had assisted at her secret midnight funeral and wrote an indignant poem about it.
77. A successful and popular journalist, who had attacked several of Voltaire’s plays, including Tancrède. Voltaire had a fine story that the devil attended the first night of Tancrède disguised as Fréron: when a lady in the balcony wept at the play’s pathos, her tear dropped on the devil’s nose; he thought it was holy water and shook it off—psha! psha! G. Desnoiresterres, Voltaire et Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pp. 3–4.
78. Actually Claire Leris (1723–1803). She had played the lead role in Tancrède and was for many years a leading figure on the Paris stage.
79. A game of cards, about which it is necessary to know only that a number of punters (bettors) play against a banker or dealer. The pack is dealt out two cards at a time, and each player may bet on any card as much as he pleases. The sharp practices of the punters consist essentially of tricks for increasing their winnings without corresponding risks.
80. A paroli is an illegal redoubling of one’s bet; her name therefore implies a title grounded in cardsharping.
81. He had written against Voltaire, and Voltaire suspected him (wrongly) of having committed a novel, L’Oracle des nouveaux philosophes.
82. His name was Trublet, and he had said, among other disagreeable things, that Voltaire’s epic poem, the Henriade, made him yawn and that Voltaire’s genius was “the perfection of mediocrity.”
83. The party of the Jesuits (from Luis Molina). Their central issue of controversy was the relative importance of divine grace and human will to the salvation of man. “Jansenists”: a relatively strict party of religious reformers (from Corneille Jansen, 1585–1638).
84. Here ends the long passage interpolated by Voltaire in 1761, which began here. In the original version the transition was managed as follows. After the “commentator’s” speech, ending: —Tomorrow I will show you twenty pamphlets written against him.
—Sir, said the abbé from Perigord, do you notice that young person over there with the attractive face and the delicate figure? She would only cost you ten thousand francs a month, and for fifty thousand crowns of diamonds …
—I could spare her only a day or two, replied Candide, because I have an urgent appointment at Venice.
Next night after supper, the sly Perigordian overflowed with politeness and assiduity.
—Well, sir, said he, so you have an assignation at Venice?
85. Atrebatum is the Latin name for the district of Artois, from which came Robert François Damiens, who tried to stab Louis XV in 1757. The assassination failed, like that of Châtel, who tried to kill Henri IV in 1594, but unlike that of Ravaillac, who succeeded in killing him in 1610.
86. The point, in fact, is not too clear since arresting foreigners is an indirect way at best to guard against homegrown fanatics, and the position of the abbé from Perigord in the whole transaction remains confused. Has he called in the officer just to get rid of Candide? If so, why is he sardonic about the very suspicions he is trying to foster? Candide’s reaction is to the notion that Frenchmen should be capable of political assassination at all; it seems excessive.
87. The wars of the French and English over Canada dragged intermittently through the 18th century till the peace of Paris sealed England’s conquest (1763). Voltaire thought the French should concentrate on developing Louisiana, where the Jesuit influence was less marked.
88. Candide has witnessed the execution of Admiral John Byng, defeated off Minorca by the French fleet under Galisonnière and executed by firing squad on March 14, 1757. Voltaire had intervened to avert the execution.
89. Member of a Catholic order founded in 1524 by Cardinal Cajetan and G. P. Caraffa, later Pope Paul IV.
90. His name means “gillyflower.” Paquette (above) means “daisy.” They are lilies of the field who spin not, neither do they reap.
91. I.e., supreme magistrate of Venice.
92. His name means “small care” or “Carelittle.”
93. Widely reputed to be the supreme painter of the Italian Renaissance.
94. Since the mid-16th century, when Julius Caesar Scaliger established the dogma, it had been customary to prefer Virgil to Homer. Voltaire’s youthful judgments, as delivered in the Essai sur la poésie épique (1728), are here summarized with minor revisions—upward for Ariosto, downward for Milton.
95. Pococurante mentions a lot of the minor characters in Virgil’s Aeneid, to make clear that he is perfectly familiar with the book he despises.
96. Tasso and Ariosto (16th century) wrote “romantic,” i.e., fantastic, epic poems often compared with those of their classical predecessors.
97. The reference is to Horace, Satires 1.7. Pococurante, with gentlemanly negligence, has corrupted Rupilius to Pupilus. Horace’s poems against witches are Epodes 5, 8, 12; the one about striking the stars with his lofty forehead is Odes 1.1.
98. Roman lawyer, elocutionist, politician, and philo
sopher (1st century B.C.E.). Since the 16th century “advanced” opinion had often dismissed him as a windbag, so Pococurante devotes little time to him.
99. Voltaire, whose standards of classical correctness led him to find major flaws in Shakespeare, could not be expected to like Paradise Lost. But in the person of Pococurante he is satirizing the bored and superior esthete, as well as teasing respectable English taste, so he deliberately overstates his case.
100. His dates are 1673–1736; he was deposed in 1730.
101. Ivan VI reigned from his birth in 1740 till 1756, then was confined in the Schlusselberg, and executed in 1764.
102. The Young Pretender (1720–88), known to his supporters as Bonnie Prince Charlie. The defeat so theatrically described took place at Culloden, April 16, 1746.
103. Augustus III (1696–1763), elector of Saxony and king of Poland, dethroned by Frederick the Great in 1756.
104. Stanislas Leczinski (1677–1766), father-in-law of Louis XV, who abdicated the throne of Poland in 1736, was made duke of Lorraine and in that capacity befriended Voltaire.
105. Theodore von Neuhof (1690–1756), an authentic Westphalian, an adventurer and a soldier of fortune, who in 1736 was (for about eight months) the elected king of Corsica. He spent time in an Amsterdam as well as a London debtor’s prison.
106. A late correction of Voltaire’s makes this passage read: —Who is this man who is in a position to give a hundred times as much as any of us, and who actually gives it? Are you a king too, sir?
—No, gentleman, and I have no desire to be.
But this reading, though Voltaire’s on good authority, produces a conflict with Candide’s previous remark: —Why are you all royalty? I assure you that Martin and I aren’t.
Thus, it has seemed better for literary reasons to follow an earlier reading. Voltaire was very conscious of his situation as a man richer than many princes; in 1758 he had money on loan to no fewer than three highnesses: Charles Eugene, duke of Wurtemburg; Charles Theodore, elector Palatine; and the duke of Saxe-Gotha.
107. Another late change adds the following question: —What does it matter whom you dine with as long as you fare well at table?