Candide
Page 32
Each of these odysseys finally leads to a Parisian episode which is essential to its resolution, clearly because, thematically speaking, France and its culture must be reckoned with before the philosophical voyage can be entire. Significantly also, although each hero returns without his idol, he possesses on the other hand a fortune which secures him definitively from want: as Cleveland has inherited the riches of Fanny’s Spanish grandfather, so Candide has the limited yet considerable remnant of his El Dorado treasure, and like the former he enters Paris in the opulent style of ‘quelque milord anglais’ (Chapter 22). Cleveland’s systematic exposure to all the pleasures of the capital (books 12–14) is a precedent both for Candide’s less ordered initiation and, because of its ultimate disappointment, that of the rich but profoundly disabused Pococurante. In Paris, Cleveland barely overcomes the seductions of La Cortona—the only episode of his life which causes him genuine remorse. There too, Candide succumbs to his first real temptation since Cunégonde, and feels ‘quelques remords d’avoir fait une infidélité’ (Chapter 22).7
Candide’s eventual recovery of Cunégonde does not belie Cleveland’s eventual reunion with Fanny, but it recalls even more specifically, as André Morize has noted, another novel by Prévost, his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Malte: ‘le héros retrouve enfin sa maîtresse Hélène enlaidie et défigurée comme Candide revoit Cunégonde, et comme elle impérieuse.’8 And despite obvious differences, there are philosophical discussions at the very end of both Cleveland and Candide which determine, or at least precipitate, the conclusion. The Lord Clarendon of Cleveland is hardly a ‘derviche,’ but he serves an analogous function as the voice of wisdom which is at once serene and free from fanatical certitudes.
Nevertheless, despite these numerous comparisons, it cannot be said that any passage in Candide is an undeniably specific reference to Cleveland. The point indeed is not so much that it is meant to be the topical parody of Cleveland alone, as that it is the parody of a certain variety of novel which Cleveland can be held to represent. Candide, to be sure, satirizes much more than one particular genre; but it is also true that Voltaire generically situated his own tales in part by the ways in which they differed from romans, a name he was reluctant to see applied to them.9 In 1733 (just when Cleveland was half completed) he wrote: ‘Si quelques nouveaux romans paraissent encore, et s’ils font l’amusement de la jeunesse frivole, les vrais gens de lettres les méprisent.’10 Such a judgment is not aesthetic alone: the novel addresses a public which Voltaire, although a vulgarizer in his own way, did not wish to claim. Twenty years later that view had scarcely changed, even if by then Voltaire was himself penning contes:
On est bien éloigné de vouloir donner ici quelque prix à tous ces romans dont la France a été et est encore inondée; ils ont presque tous été, excepté Zaïde, des productions d’esprits faibles, qui écrivent avec facilité des choses indignes d’être lues par les esprits solides.11
Thus, although the novel was not necessarily in his eyes an intrinsically inferior genre, it usually was so in practice, and was unworthy company for an author concerned for the seriousness of his work and for his intellectual reputation.
We are accustomed to thinking of Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste as anti-novels; less so of Candide, since it is not itself similar in form to a novel, and yet in significant measure it is a comparable sort of generic parody. But it reflects in addition Voltaire’s personal refusal to participate in a genre which he was not alone in associating both with base popularizing and with extravagance; doubtless too he was motivated by the fact that the novel was frequently the vehicle for a kind of sentimental righteousness which he mistrusted—and Prévost represented. Certainly this connexion is suggested by his sarcasms concerning La Nouvelle Héloïse.12 Such emotive fulsomeness is not identical with the ‘optimism’ which Candide in particular derides, but it contains at least the seeds of a self-contained assurance and self-satisfaction which to Voltaire was equally indefensible. Neither it nor the commonplaces of novelistic plots, both exemplified in Cleveland, are given any quarter in Candide, since they are part and parcel of a literary practice that, through parody, he condemns.
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† From French Studies 33 (1979): 411–19. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
1. References in the text are to my edition of Cleveland (in Œuvres de Prévost, vol. II, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977); to chapters in Candide following the Bénac edition of Romans et contes of Voltaire (Garnier, 1960); to the Deloffre/Picard edition of Manon Lescaut (Garnier, 1965). Some of the parallels which this article will note have of course been observed earlier; see especially Jean Sgard, ‘Prévost et Voltaire,’ in Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 64 (1964), 545–64.
2. Candide, xi; Cleveland, p. 597. Cleveland is spared thanks to an experiment with it carried out first on his dog.
3. That Diderot is thinking of Cleveland is explicit: ‘J’aurais bien su appeler quelqu’un [au secours de Jacques]: mais cela aurait pué le Cléveland à infecter’ (in Œuvres romanesques, Garnier, 1962, p. 526).
4. Critical edition of Candide (Paris: Hachette, 1913), chs. 17–18 and notes. Christopher Thacker, in a more recent critical edition (Geneva: Droz, 1968), does list Cleveland among the sources, but without giving specific references.
5. Ibid., p. 124, n. I.
6. If it is specifically Cleveland which Voltaire does have in mind in this passage, then the aside which follows the above quotation—‘Et que dira le Journal de Trévoux?’—would have an additional piquancy, since Prévost was much upbraided about the rationalizations of Cleveland before and after his suicide attempt, and the Journal de Trévoux in addition accused him of ‘declaring war’ on it and slandering the Jesuits. See Le Pour et Contre, VII, 5–9; Mémoires de Trévoux, Nov. 1735, 2386–88; and the response of Prévost in Henri Harrisse, L’Abbé Prévost (Paris, 1896), 239–44. As a matter of fact, the suicide section of book vi was suppressed, for reasons that cannot be precisely determined, in the first Paris edition of the novel.
7. From France, each will also set out for England. Candide never actually goes ashore, however, and sets sail instead for Venice.
8. Ed. cit., p. liv.
9. Although Romans et contes is now a standard title for his collected tales, the word roman never appeared on any edition before 1764.
10. Essai sur la poésie épique (in Œuvres complètes, Paris: Garnier, 1877–1885, vol. 8), p. 362.
11. Article ‘Villedieu’ in the ‘Catalogue des écrivains français’ appended to Le Siècle de Louis XIV (Œuvres complêtes,14).
12. See the mordant Lettres à M. de Voltaire sur la Nouvelle Héloïse, in Mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 395–409.
ERICH AUERBACH
[Voltaire’s Style: Tone, Pace, Insinuation]†
[Voltaire’s prose, which at first glance looks like a simple taut string on which to hang a set of one-liners, is a great deal more complex and interesting than that. Nobody has been more deft and patient at unraveling the way a piece of writing actually works than Erich Auerbach, the much-admired German humanist, whose classic Mimesis traces through European literature the way in which a thread of social realism intertwines with other themes and literary modes, bending syntax subtly to its purposes.
The chapter dealing with Voltaire begins by discussing a passage from the Abbé Prévost’s novel Manon Lescaut (1731). Here the surface of things is colorful, varied, lively, and graphic; the feelings depicted, on the other hand, are serious, almost tragic. Yet the language is almost invariably charming and elegant. Very different is the manner cultivated by Voltaire in one of his Lettres Philosophiques, then in a late verse narrative, and finally in Candide.—Robert M. Adams]
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Quite different is the stylistic level of the realistic texts which serv
e the propaganda purposes of the Enlightenment. Examples are to be found from the Regency on, and in the course of the century they become more frequent and increasingly aggressive polemically. The master of the game is Voltaire. As a first example we choose a fairly early piece, from the sixth of the Philosophical Letters, which deal with his impressions of England.1
Entrez dans la bourse de Londres, cette place plus respectable que bien des cours; vous y voyez rassemblés les députés de toutes les nations pour l’utilité des hommes. Là, le juif, le mahométan et le chrétien traitent l’un avec l’autre comme s’ils étaient de la même religion, et ne donnent le nom d’infidèles qu’à ceux qui font banqueroute; là, le presbytérien se fie à l’anabaptiste, et l’anglican reçoit la promesse du quaker. Au sortir de ces pacifiques et libres assemblées, les uns vont à la synagogue, les autres vont boire; celui-ci va se faire baptiser dans une grande cuve au nom du Père, par le Fils, au Saint-Esprit; celui-là fait couper le prépuce de son fils et fait marmotter sur l’enfant des paroles hébraiques qu’il n’entend point; ces autres vont dans leurs églises attendre l’inspiration de Dieu leur chapeau sur la tête, et tous sont contents.
(Enter the London stock exchange, that more respectable place than many a court; you will see the deputies of all nations gathered there for the service of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal together as if they were of the same religion, and apply the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt; there the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anglican accepts the Quaker’s promise. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others go to drink; one goes to have himself baptized in the name of the Father, through the Son, to the Holy Ghost; another has his son’s foreskin cut off and Hebrew words mumbled over him which he does not understand; others go to their church to await the inspiration of God with their hats on their heads; and all are content.)
This description of the London exchange was not really written for a realistic purpose. What goes on there, we are told only in a general way. The purpose is much rather to insinuate certain ideas, which in their crudest and driest form would run as follows: “Free international business as dictated by the egotism of individuals is beneficial to human society; it unites men in common pacific activities. Religions, on the other hand, are absurd. Their absurdity needs no proof beyond the observation that they are very numerous while each claims to be the only true one, and that their dogmas and ceremonies are nonsensical. However, in a country where they are very many and very different, so that they are forced to put up with one another, they do not do much harm and can be regarded as an innocuous form of madness. It is only when they fight and persecute one another that things get really bad.” But even in this dry formulation of the idea there is a rhetorical trick which, however, I find it impossible to eliminate because it is contained in Voltaire’s conception itself. It is the unexpected contrast of religion and business, in which business is placed higher, practically and morally, than religion. The very device of coupling the two, as though they were forms of human endeavor on the same plane and to be judged from the same viewpoint, is not only an impertinence; it is a specific approach or, if one prefers, an experimental set-up, in which religion is ipso facto deprived of what constitutes its essence and its value. It is presented in a position in which it appears ridiculous from the start. This is a technique which sophists and propagandists of all times have employed with success, and Voltaire is a master of it. It is for precisely this reason that here, where he wants to demonstrate the blessings of productive work, he chooses neither a farm nor a business office nor a factory but the stock exchange, where people of all faiths and backgrounds congregate.
The way he invites us to enter the stock exchange is almost solemn. He calls it a place deserving of greater respect than many a court, and its frequenters deputies of all nations foregathered in the interests of humanity. Then he turns to a more detailed description of its frequenters and observes them first in their activity at the exchange, then in their private life; in both cases he emphasizes their differing in religion. As long as they are at the exchange, the difference has no importance. It does not interfere with business. This gives him the opportunity to introduce his play on the word infidèle. But as soon as they leave the exchange—that peaceful and free assembly, in contrast to the assemblies of battling clerics—the disparateness of their religious views comes to the fore. What was just now a harmonious whole—a symbol as it were of the ideal cooperation of all human society—now falls asunder into numerous unrelated and indeed incompatible parts. The remainder of the passage is given over to a lively description of a number of these. Leaving the exchange, the merchants disperse. Some go to a synagogue, others go to have a drink. The syntactic parallel presents the two as equally worthy ways of passing the time. Then we get a characterization of three groups of pious frequenters of the exchange: Anabaptists, Jews, and Quakers. In each case Voltaire emphasizes a purely external detail which differs from and is in no way related to the next but which in every instance is intrinsically absurd and comic. What comes out is not really the true nature of Jews or Quakers, not the grounds and the specific form of their convictions, but the external aspect of their religious ceremonial, which, especially to the uninitiated, looks strangely comic. This again is an example of a favorite propaganda device which is often used far more crudely and maliciously than in this case. It might be called the searchlight device. It consists in overilluminating one small part of an extensive complex, while everything else which might explain, derive, and possibly counterbalance the thing emphasized is left in the dark; so that apparently the truth is stated, for what is said cannot be denied; and yet everything is falsified, for truth requires the whole truth and the proper interrelation of its elements. Especially in times of excited passions, the public is again and again taken in by such tricks, and everybody knows more than enough examples from the very recent past. And yet in most cases the trick is not at all hard to see through; in tense periods, however, the people or the public lack the serious desire to do so. Whenever a specific form of life or a social group has run its course, or has only lost favor and support, every injustice which the propagandists perpetrate against it is half consciously felt to be what it actually is, yet people welcome it with sadistic delight. Gottfried Keller2 describes this psychological situation very finely in one of the novellas in his Seldwyla cycle, the story of lost laughter, in which a campaign of defamation in Switzerland is discussed. It is true, the things he describes compare with what we have seen in our time as a slight turbidity in the clear water of a brook would compare with an ocean of filth and blood. Gottfried Keller discusses the matter with his calm clarity and lack of prejudice, without softening the least detail, without the slightest attempt to whitewash the injustice or to speak of it as a “higher” form of justice; and yet he seems to sense in such things an element that is natural and at times beneficial, because after all “more than once a change of government and the expansion of freedom have resulted from an unjust cause or untrue pretense.” Keller was fortunate in that he could not imagine an important change of government which would not entail an expansion of freedom. We have been shown otherwise.
Voltaire concludes with an unexpected turn: et tous sont contents. With the swiftness of a prestidigitator he has, in three sharp phrases, parodied three creeds or sects, and the four concluding words are sprung at us just as swiftly, surprisingly, and merrily. They are extremely rich in content. Why is everybody satisfied? Because everybody is allowed to do business and grow wealthy in peace; and because everybody is no less peacefully allowed to cling to his religious madness, with the result that no one persecutes or is persecuted. Long live tolerance! It lets everybody have his business and his fun, whether the latter is taking a drink or persisting in some absurd form of worship.
The method of posing the problem so that the desired solution is contained in the very way in which the problem is posed, and the sea
rchlight technique, which overilluminates the ridiculous, the absurd, or the repulsive in one’s opponent, were both in use long before Voltaire. But he has a particular way of handling them which is all his own. Especially his own is his tempo. His rapid, keen summary of the development, his quick shifting of scenes, his surprisingly sudden confronting of things which are not usually seen together—in all this he comes close to being unique and incomparable; and it is in this tempo that a good part of his wit lies. As one reads his marvelous rococo sketches, the point becomes strikingly clear. For example:
Comme il était assez près de Lutèce,
Au coin d’un bois qui borde Charenton,
Il aperçut la fringante Marton
Dont un ruban nouait la blonde tresse;
Sa taille est leste, et son petit jupon
Laisse entrevoir sa jambe blanche et fine.
Robert avance; il lui trouve une mine
Qui tenterait les saints du paradis;
Un beau bouquet de roses et de lis
Est au milieu de deux pommes d’albâtre
Qu’on ne voit point sans en être idolâtre;
Et de son teint la fleur et l’incarnat
De son bouquet auraient terni l’éclat.
Pour dire tout, cette jeune merveille
A son giron portait une corbeille,
Et s’en allait avec tous ses altraits
Vendre au marché du beurre et des œufs frais.
Sire Robert, ému de convoitise,
Descend d’un saut, l’accole avec franchise:
“J’ai vingt écus, dit-il, dans ma valise;
C’est tout mon bien; prenez encor mon cœur:
Tout est à vous. —C’est pour moi trop d’honneur,”
Lui dit Marton.…
(Not far from Paris, at the corner of a wood which borders Charenton, he saw the dashing Marton, with her blond hair bound by a ribbon. Her waist is trim and her little skirt permits a glimpse of her slim white leg. Robert approaches: he finds a face which would tempt the saints in Paradise; a beautiful bouquet of roses and lilies lies between two alabaster apples which none can see without adoring; and the freshness and bloom of her complexion would have dulled the brightness of her bouquet. To speak plainly, the young miracle of beauty was carrying a basket in her arms and, with all her attractions, was on her way to market to sell butter and fresh eggs. Sir Robert, shaken with unholy desire, dismounted at one jump and frankly embraced her. Said he: “I have twenty crowns in my valise; it is my entire fortune; take my heart to boot: the whole is yours.” “The honor is too great,” Marton replied.…)