The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library)

by Francois Voltaire

  “Men,” answered the angel Jesrad, “judge of everything without understanding anything. You of all men most merited enlightenment.”

  Zadig begged permission to speak. “I lack confidence in my own judgment,” he said, “dare I beg you to throw light on one of my misgivings: would it not have been better to have corrected this child and to have brought him into the path of virtue than to drown him?”

  “If he had been virtuous and if he had lived,” replied Jesrad, “his destiny was to have been murdered himself with the woman he was to marry and the child which was to be born to him.”

  “What then!” said Zadig, “must there be crimes and misfortunes? and must misfortunes fall on good people!”

  “The wicked,” answered Jesrad, “are always unhappy: they serve to prove the small number of the just scattered over the face of the earth, and there is no evil of which good is not born.”

  “But supposing,” said Zadig, “there were only good, and no evil?”

  “In that case,” replied Jesrad, “this earth would be another earth, the concatenation of events would belong to another order of wisdom; and that order, which would be perfect, can exist only in the eternal abode of the supreme Being, whom evil cannot approach. He has created millions of worlds, no one of which can resemble another. This vast variety is a symbol of the vastness of his power. On the earth there are no two leaves of a tree like to each other, and in the limitless plains of the heavens no two orbs. All you see on the little atom where you have been born had to be, in its appointed place and time, in accordance with the immutable laws of him who embodies everything. Men think that the child who has just perished fell into the water by chance, that by the same chance this house was burned: but there is no such thing as chance; everything is test, or punishment, or reward, or prevision. Remember the fisherman who thought himself the most unfortunate of men. Ormuzd sent you to change his destiny. Frail mortall cease contending with that which is to be worshiped.”

  “But ...” said Zadig.

  As he was saying “but,” the angel was already soaring toward the tenth sphere. On his knees Zadig adored Providence, and submitted. From on high the angel called to him: “Go on your way to Babylon.”

  XXI. THE RIDDLES

  Zadig, beside himself and like a man near whom a thunderbolt has fallen, wandered on aimlessly. He entered Babylon on the day when those who had fought in the arena were already gathered in the great hall of the palace to solve the riddles and answer the questions put by the Grand Magus. With the exception of the man in green armor all the knights had arrived. As soon as Zadig appeared in the town the people flocked round him. Their eyes could not see enough of him, their mouths bless him sufficiently, their hearts wish ardently enough that he might be their king. The Envious saw him pass, shuddered and turned away. The people carried him right to the assembly hall. The queen, who was apprised of his arrival, was a prey to a fever of fear and hope. Anxiety consumed her: she could not understand why Zadig was without arms, or how Itobad was wearing the suit of white armor. At sight of Zadig there was a confused murmuring. Everyone was surprised and delighted to see him, but only knights who had fought were allowed to appear at the assembly.

  “I have fought as well as anyone else,” he said, “but my arms are borne here by another. While awaiting the honor of proving that what I say is true, I ask permission to come forward to solve the riddles.” The question was put to the vote: Zadig’s reputation for integrity was still so strongly impressed on their minds that they did not hesitate to admit him.

  The Grand Magus propounded this question first of all: What of all things in the world is the longest and the shortest, the quickest and the slowest, the most divisible and the most extended, the most neglected and the most regretted, without which nothing can be done, which destroys everything that is small and gives life to everything that is great?

  Itobad had to answer. He replied that a man like him knew nothing of riddles, and that it was enough for him that he had conquered with sturdy thrusts from his lance. Some said that the answer to the riddle was Fortune, others the World, others Light. Zadig said it was Time. “Nothing is longer,” he added, “since it is the measure of eternity, nothing is shorter since all our schemes lack it; nothing is slower to him who waits, and nothing passes more quickly for him who is happy; on the one hand it extends right up to infinity, and on the other it may be divided and subdivided right down to infinity; all men disregard it, and all men regret losing it; nothing can be done without it; it condemns to oblivion all that is unworthy of posterity, and makes the great things immortaL” The assembly agreed that Zadig was right.

  The next question was: What is the thing one receives without returning thanks for it, which one enjoys without knowing how, which one gives to others when one has had enough of it, and which one loses without noticing it?

  Everyone had his say, but Zadig alone guessed it was Life. He solved all the other riddles with equal ease. Itobad continued to say that nothing was simpler and that he could have succeeded as easily had he wished to give himself the trouble. Questions were put on Justice, the Sovereign Good, the Art of Ruling. Zadig’s answers were judged the soundest. “It is a pity,” people said, “such a gifted fellow should be so poor a horseman.”

  “Noble lords,” said Zadig, addressing the assembly, “I had the honor of winning in the arena. The white armor belongs to me. Itobad took possession of it while I slept: he evidently thought it would suit him better than the green. I am ready to prove to him, and before you all, with my gown and sword against all that beautiful white armor he has taken from me, that it was I who had the honor of beating brave Otame.”

  Itobad accepted the challenge with the greatest assurance in the world. He had no doubts but that with his casque, cuirass and armguard he would dispose of a champion in nightcap and dressing-gown. Zadig drew his sword and saluted the queen, who was watching him filled with joy and apprehension. Itobad drew his, and saluted nobody. He advanced on Zadig like a man who had nothing to fear, ready to split his head in two. Zadig parried the blow by opposing what is called the “forte” of his sword to his adversary’s “feeble,” with result that Itobad’s sword snapped. Then Zadig seized his enemy by the body, threw him to the ground and with the point of his sword at a vulnerable spot in Itobad’s cuirass, cried to him: “Let yourself be disarmed or I shall kill you!” Itobad, always astonished at the calamities which befell a man like him, let Zadig do as he would, and the latter tranquilly took off his magnificent casque, his splendid cuirass, his beautiful armlets, his bright thigh pieces. These he donned, and then ran to fall at the knees of Astarte. Cador proved easily that the armor belonged to Zadig. He was acknowledged king by consent of all and particularly of Astarte, who tasted after so many adversities the joy of seeing her lover worthy in the world’s eyes of being her spouse. Itobad went back to his house to have himself called “my lord.” Zadig was king, and was happy. He bore in mind what the angel Jesrad had said. He remembered even the grain of sand that became a diamond. The queen and he worshiped Providence. Zadig let that capricious beauty Missouf travel. He sent to find the brigand Arbogad, to whom he gave honorable rank in his army, with a promise to raise him to the highest rank if he conducted himself as a real warrior, and to hang him if he pursued the profession of brigand.

  Sétoc was called from the depths of Arabia, with his beautiful Almona, to be at the head of the commerce of Babylon. A place was found for Cador, and he was cared for as his services entitled him to be: he was the king’s friend, and the king was the only monarch on earth who had a friend. The little mute was not forgotten. The fisherman was given a fine house. Orcan was condemned to pay him a large sum, and to give him back his wife: but the fisherman had grown wise, and he accepted the money only.

  Beautiful Sémire could not console herself for having thought that Zadig would be a one-eyed man, nor could Azora stop weeping for having wanted to cut off his nose: The Envious died of rage and shame. The empire
enjoyed peace, glory, and abundance: it was the finest century on earth, for the government was one of justice and love. Men gave their blessings to Zadig, while he gave his to heaven.

  Translation by H. I. Woolf

  Micromegas

  PHILOSOPHIC STORY

  CHAPTER I

  Journey of an Inhabitant of the World of the Star Sirius into the Planet Saturn

  IN ONE of those planets which revolve round the star named Sirius there was a young man of much wit with whom I had the honor to be acquainted during the last visit he made to our little anthill. He was called Micromegas, a name very well suited to all big men. His height was eight leagues: by eight leagues I mean twenty-four thousand geometrical paces of five feet each.

  Some of the mathematicians, persons of unending public utility, will at once seize their pens and discover that, since Mr. Micromegas, inhabitant of the land of Sirius, measures from head to foot twenty-four thousand paces (which make one-hundred-and-twenty thousand royal feet), and since we other citizens of the earth measure barely five feet, and our globe has a circumference of nine thousand leagues—they will discover, I say, that it follows absolutely that the globe which produced Mr. Micromegas must have exactly twenty-one million six hundred thousand times more circumference than our little earth. Nothing in nature is simpler or more ordinary. The states of certain German and Italian sovereigns, round which one may travel completely in half an hour, compared with the empires of Turkey, Muscovy, or China, are but a very feeble example of the prodigious differences which nature contrives everywhere.

  His Excellency’s stature being as I have stated, all our sculptors and all our painters will agree without difficulty that he is fifty thousand royal feet round the waist; which makes him very nicely proportioned.

  As regards his mind, it is one of the most cultured we possess. He knows many things, and has invented a few. He had not yet reached the age of two-hundred-and-fifty, and was studying, according to custom, at the Jesuit college in his planet, when he solved by sheer brain power more than fifty of the problems of Euclid. That is eighteen more than Blaise Pascal who, after solving thirty-two to amuse himself, according to his sister, became a rather mediocre geometer and a very inferior metaphysician.

  Toward the age of four hundred and fifty, when his childhood was past, he dissected many of those little insects which, not being a hundred feet across, escape the ordinary microscope. He wrote about them a very singular book which, however, brought him some trouble. The mufti of his country, a hair-splitter of great ignorance, found in it assertions that were suspicious, rash, offensive, unorthodox, and savoring of heresy, and prosecuted him vigorously. The question was whether the bodies of Sirian fleas were made of the same substance as the bodies of Sirian slugs. Micromegas defended himself with spirit, and brought all the women to his way of thinking. The case lasted two hundred and twenty years, and ended by the mufti having the book condemned by some jurists who had not read it, and by the author being banished from the court for eight hundred years.

  Micromegas was only moderately distressed at being banished from a court which was such a hotbed of meannesses and vexations. He wrote a very droll song against the mufti, which hardly troubled that dignitary, and set forth on a journey from planet to planet in order to finish forming his heart and mind, as the saying is.

  Those who travel only in post-chaise and coach will be astonished, doubtless, at the methods of transport in the world above, for we on our little mud-heap cannot imagine anything outside the range of our ordinary experience. Our traveler had a marvelous knowledge of the laws of gravitation, and of the forces of repulsion and attraction. He made such excellent use of them that sometimes by the good offices of a comet, and at others by the help of a sunbeam, he and his friends went from globe to globe as a bird flutters from branch to branch. He traversed the Milky Way in no time, and I am forced to confess that he never saw through the stars with which it is sown the beautiful paradise that the illustrious and reverend Mr. Derham boasts of having seen at the end of his spyglass. Not that I claim that Mr. Derham’s eyesight is bad: God forbid! but Micromegas was on the spot, he is a sound observer, and I do not wish to contradict anyone.

  After making a long tour, Micromegas reached the globe of Saturn. Although he was accustomed to see new things, he could not, on beholding the littleness of the globe and its inhabitants, refrain from that superior smile to which even the wisest men are sometimes subject. For Saturn, after all, is hardly more than nine hundred times bigger than the earth, and its citizens are dwarfs only about a thousand fathoms tall. He and his friends laughed at them at first, much as an Italian musician, when he comes to France, laughs at Lulli’s music. The Sirian had good brains, however- and understood quickly that a thinking being may very well not be ridiculous merely because his height is only six thousand feet. Having started by amazing the Saturnians, he finished by becoming intimate with them. He engaged in a close friendship with the secretary of the Academy of Saturn, a man of much wit who, although he had indeed invented nothing himself, yet had a very good idea of the inventions of others, and had produced quite passable light verses and weighty computations.

  I will record here for the benefit of my readers an odd conversation which Micromegas had with Mr. Secretary.

  CHAPTER II

  Conversation of the Inhabitant of Sirius with the Inhabitant of Saturn

  When his Excellency had laid himself down, and the secretary had drawn near to his face, Micromegas spoke. “It must be admitted,” he said, “that there is plenty of variety in nature.”

  “Yes,” agreed the Saturnian, “nature is like a flower bed of which the flowers ...”

  “Enough of your flower bed,” said the other.

  “Nature,” resumed the secretary, “is like a company of fair women and dark women whose apparel ...”

  “What have I to do with your dark women?” said the other.

  “Well, then, nature is like a gallery of pictures whose features ...”

  “Oh, no!” said the traveler. “I tell you once more—nature is like nature. Why seek to compare it with anything?”

  “To please you,” answered the secretary.

  “I do not want people to please me,” replied the traveler. “I want them to teach me. Begin by telling me how many senses men in your world have.”

  “We have seventy-two,” said the academician, “and we complain every day that we have not more. Our imagination surpasses our needs. We find that with our seventy-two senses, our ring, and our five moons, we are too limited; and despite all our curiosity and the fairly large number of emotions arising from our seventy-two senses, we have plenty of time to be bored.”

  “That I can quite understand,” said Micromegas, “for although in our world we have nearly a thousand senses, we still have an indescribable, vague yearning, an inexpressible restlessness, which warns us incessantly that we are of small account, and that there exist beings far more perfect. I have traveled a little, and I have seen mortals much below our level; I have also seen others far superior: but I have not seen any who have not more appetites than real needs, and more needs than contentment. One day, maybe, I shall reach the country where nobody lacks anything, but up to now no one has given me definite news of that country.”

  The Saturnian and the Sirian proceeded to tire themselves out with conjectures, but after many very ingenious and very uncertain arguments, they were forced to return to facts.

  “How long do you live?” asked the Sirian.

  “Ah! a very short time,” replied the small man of Saturn.

  “Just as with us,” said the Sirian. “We are always complaining how short life is. It must be one of the universal laws of nature.”

  “Alas!” sighed the Saturnian. “We live for only five hundred complete revolutions of the sun. (That makes fifteen thousand years, or thereabouts, according to our reckoning.) As you can see, that means dying almost as soon as one is born. Our existence is a point, our duration a
flash, our globe an atom. Hardly has one started to improve one’s self a little than death arrives before one has any experience. For my part, I dare make no plans; I am like a drop of water in an immense ocean. I am ashamed, particularly before you, of the ridiculous figure I cut in this world.”

  “If you were not a philosopher,” returned Micromegas, “I should fear to distress you by telling you that our life is seven hundred times as long as yours, but you know too well that when a man has to return his body to the earth whence it sprang, to bring life again to nature in another form—which is called dying—it is precisely the same thing, when the time for this metamorphosis arrives, whether he has lived a day or an eternity. I have been in countries where the people lived a thousand times longer than my people, and they still grumbled. But everywhere there are persons who know how to accept their fate and thank the author of nature. He has spread over this universe variety in profusion, coupled with a kind of wonderful uniformity. For instance, all thinking beings are different, and yet at bottom all resemble each other in their possession of the gifts of thought and aspiration. Matter is found everywhere, but in each globe it has different properties. How many of these properties do you count your matter as having?”

  “If you speak of those properties,” said the Saturnian, “without which we believe our globe could not exist in its present form, we count three hundred, such as extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravitation, divisibility, and so on.”

  “It appears,” said the traveler, “that for the Creator’s purposes regarding your insignificant abode that small number suffices. I admire His wisdom in everything. I see differences everywhere, but everywhere also I see proportion. Your world is small, and so are its occupants; you have few sensations; your matter has few properties: all that is the work of Providence. Of what color does your sun prove to be if you examine it closely?”