Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Philosophical Dictionary
Selections
Miscellany
Candide
CHAPTER I - How Candide Was Brought Up in a Noble Castle and How He Was ...
CHAPTER II - What Happened to Candide Among the Bulgarians
CHAPTER III - How Candide Escaped from the Budgarians and What Became of Him
CHAPTER IV - How Candide Met His Old Master in Philosophy, Doctor Pangloss, and ...
CHAPTER V - Storm, Shipwreck, Earthquake, and What Happened to Dr. Pangloss, to ...
CHAPTER VI - How a Splendid Auto-da-Fé Was Held to Prevent Earthquakes, and How ...
CHAPTER VII - How an Old Woman Took Care of Candide and How He Regained That ...
CHAPTER VIII - Cunegonde’s Story
CHAPTER IX - What Happened to Cunegonde, to Candide, to the Grand Inquisitor ...
CHAPTER X - How Candide, Cunegonde and the Old Woman Arrived at Cadiz in Great ...
CHAPTER XI - The Old Woman’s Story
CHAPTER XII - Continuation of the Old Woman’s Misfortunes
CHAPTER XIII - How Candide Was Obliged to Separate from the Fair Cunegonde and ...
CHAPTER XIV - How Candide and Cacambo Were Received by the jesuits in Paraguay
CHAPTER XV - How Candide Killed His Dear Cunegonde’s Brothe?
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII - Arrival of Candide and His Valet in the Country of Eldorado and ...
CHAPTER XVIII - What They Saw in the Land of Eldorado
CHAPTER XIX - What Happened to Them at Surinam and How Candide Made the ...
CHAPTER XX - What Happened to Candide and Martin at Sea
CHAPTER XXI - Candide and Martin Approach the Coast of France and Argue
CHAPTER XXII - What Happened to Candide and Martin in France
CHAPTER XXIII - Candide and Martin Reach the Coast of England; and What They ...
CHAPTER XXIV - Paquette and Friar Giroflée
CHAPTER XXV - Visit to the Noble Venetian, Lord Pococurante
CHAPTER XXVI - How Candide and Martin Supped With Six Singers and Who They Were
CHAPTER XXVII - Candide’s Voyage to Constantinople
CHAPTER XXVIII - What Happened to Candide, to Cunegonde, to Pangloss, to ...
CHAPTER XXIX - How Candide Found Cunegonde and the Old Woman Again
CHAPTER XXX - Conclusion
Zadig
I. THE ONE-EYED MAN
II. THE NOSE
III. THE DOG AND THE HORSE
IV. THE ENVIOUS MAN
V. THE GENEROUS MAN
VI. THE MINISTER
VII. DISPUTES AND AUDIENCES
VIII. JEALOUSY
IX. THE WOMAN WHO WAS FLOGGED
X. SLAVERY
XI. THE FUNERAL PYRE
XII. THE SUPPER
XIII. THE ASSIGNATION
XIV. THE DANCE
XV. BLUE EYES
XVI. THE BRIGAND
XVII. THE FISHERMAN
XVIII. THE BASILISK
XIX. THE TOURNAMENTS
XX. THE HERMIT
XXI. THE RIDDLES
Micromegas - PHILOSOPHIC STORY
CHAPTER I - Journey of an Inhabitant of the World of the Star Sirius into the ...
CHAPTER II - Conversation of the Inhabitant of Sirius with the Inhabitant of Saturn
CHAPTER III - Journey of the Two Inhabitants of Sirius and Saturn
CHAPTER IV - What Happened to Them on Earth
CHAPTER V - Experiences and Reasonings of the Two Travelers
CHAPTER VI - What Befell Them with the Men
CHAPTER VII - Conversation with the Men
Story of a Good Brahmin
Letters
Letters to Frederick the Great
Miscellaneous Letters
Selections from The English Letters - The English Parliament
Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations - Recapitulation
The Lisbon Earthquake
THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), who later took the name of Voltaire, was the son of a notary and educated at a Jesuit school in Paris. His father wanted him to study the law, but the young man was determined on a literary career. He gained an introduction to the intellectual life of Paris, and soon won a reputation as a writer of satires and odes—a not altogether enviable reputation, for the suspicion of having written a satire on the Regent procured him a term of six months’ imprisonment in the Bastille. On his release, his first tragedy, Oedipe, was performed (1718) in Paris with great success; and soon after he published the poem he had written in prison, a national epic, La Henriade (1724), which placed him with Homer and Virgil in the eyes of his contemporaries. After a second term of imprisonment in the Bastille, Voltaire spent three years (1726-9) in England, and returned to France full of enthusiasm for the intellectual activity and the more tolerant form of government he had found there. His enthusiasm and his indictment of the French system of government are expressed in his Letters on England (1733), whose sale was absolutely forbidden in France. He is one of the greatest and most universally known figures in all French literature—poet, dramatist, historian, philosopher, and writer of masterpieces of fiction such as Candide, as well as his widely read Philosophic Dictionary. Throughout his life he never ceased from conducting his energetic attack against all manifestations of tyranny and persecution by a privileged orthodoxy in Church and State. He died at the age of eighty-four, after a triumphant visit to the Paris from which he had been exiled for so long.
Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.
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First published in the United States of America
by Viking Penguin Inc. 1949
Paperbound edition published 1955
Expanded edition published 1968
Reprinted 1969 (twice), 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976
Published in Penguin Books 1977
Copyright 1949 by Viking Penguin Inc. Copyright © Viking Penguin Inc., 1968 Copyright © renewed Viking Penguin Inc., 1977
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA ·
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 1694-1778.
The portable Voltaire.
I. Redman, Ben Ray, 1896-1961 II. Title.
[PQ2075 1977] 848’ .5’ 08 77-4746
eISBN : 978-1-101-12812-1
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Editor’s Introduction
ON THE twenty-first day of November, 1694, in the city of Paris, a fifth child was born to M. Francois Arouet, a prosperous lawyer long connected with the Department of Justice, and his wife Marie Marguerite, whose family name is variously recorded as Daumart, Daumard, and d’Aumard. On the very threshold of life this miserable male infant was so close to death that his survival was despaired of, and there is a tradition that he was hastily baptized at home; but there also exists a transcript from a register which states that he was carried to the font of Saint-André-des-Arts, church of the parish in which the Arouets then resided, and there quite properly named François Marie.
In any case, it was assumed that his stay on this corrupt earth would be of the utmost brevity, so it was a great surprise, even a miracle, to parents, doctors, nurses, godparents, and other adults interested in the feeble creature, when he defied fate by remaining alive for many weeks, and then for months that began to add up to a considerable total. Indeed, the miracle extended itself in a way that threatened to become monotonous, for if the notary’s son spent his whole life—as we all do —in the act of dying, he was at it rather longer than most of us; since it was not until May 30, 1778, that the expectation aroused at his birth was finally realized. By that time, of course, all those who had surrounded his cradle had vanished from the earth, but there were still people to note his passing, for, when he finally did consent to die, the name which he had bestowed upon himself, that name with its eminently satisfying nobiliary particle—Arouet de Voltaire—had long been one of the most famous names in the world.
He had made it so by a lifetime of indefatigable effort in almost every branch of literature; by the exercise of a literary talent that was at once fine, robust, and amazingly adaptable; by a vigorous, extensive, and often embittered involvement with many of the great men of his age; by tireless pamphleteering against superstition, fanaticism, and oppression; and, in his later years, by an active and practical championship of several victims of the unjust forces he had so consistently opposed. His career divides itself into distinct phases, for the convenience of biographers, and his talent flowers in a succession of forms, but his most serious interests run like a continuous and unifying strand from his beginnings to his end. When the lord and patriarch of Ferney sharpened his quill for the defense of Calas, Sirven, and the Chevalier de la Barre, he was merely carrying to their logical conclusion the ideas of the young man who in his first play, Oedipe, had warned his hearers against the calculated deceptions and cruel tyrannies of the priestly craft. And if, in the course of his fight against the enemy which he called l’infâme, he began by using words that were only words, and then went on to give words the striking power of deeds, he was, in so doing, quite simply moving with the deepest ground swell or time spirit of his age. As historians have noted, the material for the battle of free thought was collected during the first half of the eighteenth century, while the battle itself was fought during the second half. But, if Voltaire moved with the times, he also moved with a degree of conspicudusness that was nearly unique; that caused men who came after him to speak of the century of Voltaire.
It is not, however, his underlying consistency that has impressed his admirers as much as his obvious versatility and his protean achievements. Charles Nodier was only slightly more eloquent than many others, when he declared: “There is something of the immense and the marvellous in the literary career of Voltaire. At eighteen, he was Aeschylus; at thirty, he was Sallust; at forty, Ariosto. He ended by joining to his scepter a jester’s cap and bells, and the genius whose tragedies had evoked so many tears amused himself by eclipsing both Swift and Rabelais.”
These are strong words, but they are at least matched by some of Goethe’s, in a passage that takes off from the solid ground of wahrheit to soar in the free air of dichtung. Listen to Weimar’s great ornament and oracle: “Depth, genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy, elevation, originality, nature, intellect, fancy, rectitude, facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance, variety, fertility, warmth, magic, charm, grace, force, an eagle’s sweep of vision, vast understanding, rich instruction, excellent tone, urbanity, vivacity, delicacy, correctness, purity, clearness, elegance, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gaiety, pathos, sublimity, universality, perfection, indeed—behold Voltaire.”
It would seem that just as Falstaff, who was himself witty, was the cause of wit in his companions, so Voltaire, who sometimes exaggerated, often caused others to do likewise. But if there are today few critics who would rank his tragedies with those of Aeschylus, and not many more who would salute him with all the eulogistic nouns that streamed from Goethe’s pen, the warrants of his fame are still clear and genuine.
That his plays and nondramatic poems, with one or two exceptions, are now much read in France is improbable ; and it is certain that they are even less often visited in their English versions. But one need go no further than the first of the dramas—in which the poet has rearranged classical elements with skill and power, while exhibiting both cultivated eloquence and a keen theatrical sense—to realize that Voltaire was a poetplaywright of high qualities. As for the history, running to many volumes, it is more praised than perused; and there is no reason why the case should be otherwise. It is praised because its author, following a lead of Fontenelle’s, took for his object, not political or military history, but “the history of the arts, of commerce, of civilization, in a word of the human mind.” It is praised. for its original, innovating character; for its foreshadowing of a certain kind of history. But it need no longer be read, because the body of information which it offers has been rendered obsolete by historians who have practiced a type of scholarship and enjoyed advantages which were both unknown to Voltaire, and because no one of its component parts—neither the famous Essay on Manners, Louis XIV, Charles XII, nor the Annals—has the character of a self-sufficient literary masterpiece; the character by which some histories endure, even become what we call immortal, despite the supersession of their facts.
The excursions into science, the deistical treatises, the extensive and intensive Biblical criticism in which pioneer work was done, the dubious approaches to metaphysics ? We should hardly say that it is for any one of these things that we value Voltaire today, that we read him, learn from him, enjoy him. And yet it is really for the sake of them all together, along with all his other interests and acnievements that we turn to him; for it took the whole and many-sided man he was to write Candide and the other brilliant tales which express so pungently, so lucidly, and so amusingly his view of humanity and its predicament. It took the whole man to furnish the large and rambling structure of the Philosophical Dictionary, whose many chambers hold so much in the way of worldly wisdom, shrewd speculation, quaint history, and provocative argument. It took the whole man to write even the letters that reveal him so distinctly. And surely nothing less than the whole man could have made himself into the spokesman and embodiment that he became, that he is—the spokesman and representative of a great age that was heavy with the future; the embodiment of an intellectual position, courageously held in the midst of life’s evils and mysteries.
Of course, it required many decades for him to become what he did, and, as has been said, the process app
ears to have divided itself into distinct phases which have proved a boon to tidy-minded biographers. Youth; the exile in England; the union with Madame du Châte let; the visit to Frederick; the final avatar of Geneva and Femey—these are the five periods into which the eighty-four years of Voltaire’s life conveniently fall. We shall survey them, in a moment. But first, at this not inappropriate point, let us remind ourselves of the nature and extent of the ill-health which plagued Voltaire from birth to death, and let us try also to picture the face and figure of this extraordinary sufferer.
It seems most probable that the prime seat of his afflictions was tuberculosis, that he was the child of a tuberculous mother. Such, at least, is the conclusion of a physician who studied the case less than twenty years ago, and who wrote: “Intimate daily contact during infancy and early childhood with a mother evidently tuberculous may have much to do with Voltaire’s perennial frailty. Such contact often leads to premature death, but occasionally as in Voltaire’s case, confers a certain degree of immunity leaving a mummied crucible where the fires of genius may burn with an effulgence not often seen in the non-tuberculous.” 1
Whatever the seat of his maladies, they manifested themselves in a multitude of symptoms, reports of which swarm through his letters. At various times, and often with a concentration of ailments, we find him complaining that he is cursed by catarrh, dysentery, itch, smallpox, grippe, fever, chronic colic, erysipelas, gout, apoplexy, inflammation of the lungs, scurvy, herpes, rheumatism, strangury, deafness, indigestion, dropsy, falling teeth, loss of voice, neuritis, blindness, and paralysis. If he managed to be free from pain for two hours out of twelve, he counted himself fortunate. Distrusting and damning doctors, he was still an easy gull for novel remedies and was forever dosing himself, with a particularly heavy reliance on purges. He was always cold. No sun could be too hot for him, and he found no room comfortably furnished unless it included a blazing fire. Death stood always at his elbow, as he was fond of informing his correspondents. In 1746 he assured Frederick of Prussia: “I do not think my health will allow me to work much hereafter; I am fallen into a state where I think there is no help for me. I await death patiently.” And eleven years later he informed the same royal friend: “I shall soon enter my sixty-fifth year; I was born sickly; I have but a moment to live ...”
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