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Candide
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Chapter I — How Candide Was Brought Up in a Magnificent Castle, and How He Was Expelled Thence
In a castle of Westphalia, belonging to the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, lived a youth, whom nature had endowed with the most gentle manners. His countenance was a true picture of his soul. He combined a true judgment with simplicity of spirit, which was the reason, I apprehend, of his being called Candide. The old servants of the family suspected him to have been the son of the Baron’s sister, by a good, honest gentleman of the neighborhood, whom that young lady would never marry because he had been able to prove only seventy-one quarterings, the rest of his genealogical tree having been lost through the injuries of time.
The Baron was one of the most powerful lords in Westphalia, for his castle had not only a gate, but windows. His great hall, even, was hung with tapestry. All the dogs of his farm-yards formed a pack of hounds at need; his grooms were his huntsmen; and the curate of the village was his grand almoner. They called him “My Lord,” and laughed at all his stories.
The Baron’s lady weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, and was therefore a person of great consideration, and she did the honours of the house with a dignity that commanded still greater respect. Her daughter Cunegonde was seventeen years of age, fresh-coloured, comely, plump, and desirable. The Baron’s son seemed to be in every respect worthy of his father. The Preceptor Pangloss[1] was the oracle of the family, and little Candide heard his lessons with all the good faith of his age and character.
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Project Gutenberg #19942
Candide is a short, fast, merciless satire about a young man raised on the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds and then driven through the worst of it. Voltaire published it in 1759, at sixty-four, and aimed it at the philosophical optimism he associated with Leibniz and with Pope’s Essay on Man. The method is a joke told until it stops being funny: every catastrophe meets a theory that explains it away. The chapters run two or three pages, the sentences are short, and the deadpan voice does the work a sermon could not.
The book argues by anecdote rather than by proof. Pangloss demonstrates that the nose was made for spectacles; the world answers with an earthquake, a battlefield, a slave with a severed hand and a sunken ship. Voltaire never sets a better system in place — Martin’s Manichaeism is offered, used, and quietly dropped — and the famous last sentence is less a solution than a change of subject. Between the pleasure of the joke and the seriousness of the injury lies a gap the book never closes, and that gap is why it is still read. All thirty chapters are here. See Wikipedia’s article on Candide for its publication history. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #19942.
Candide by Voltaire: Summary, Characters & Themes
This summary and analysis of Candide follows the book through all thirty of its chapters, from the Baron’s castle in Westphalia to the small farm on the Bosphorus where the survivors finally stop talking and start digging. Voltaire published it in 1759, and it is not a novel in the sense that Fielding or Richardson wrote novels: there is no interior life, no development, almost no chronology. There is a young man endowed with “the most gentle manners” who is kicked out of a castle, conscripted, flogged, shipwrecked and swindled, and a cast of companions who take turns telling him stories worse than his own. The book is best read as a machine for testing one sentence — that all is for the best — under repeated load.
The author is Voltaire, and the text of Candide itself has a long critical history. The author is Voltaire, who was sixty-four when Candide appeared and already the most famous writer in Europe, with a fortune made in finance, a house near Geneva and a long record of quarrelling with censors. He published it anonymously, behind a title page that attributed the tale to a German doctor named Ralph, and he kept the joke going in his letters for years. Philip Littell’s 1918 introduction repeats the old story that Voltaire wrote it in three days, which is almost certainly too neat; the speed is audible all the same. The paragraphs are short, the transitions are abrupt, and nobody in the book ever pauses to think before speaking.
Voltaire’s target is not evil but the explanation of evil. Pangloss’s lecture — “things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end” — is a parody of reasoning by final causes, and the joke is that the method works on anything: legs are visibly designed for stockings, and we have stockings. The Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755 was the case that broke the argument for many of Voltaire’s contemporaries, and the poem he wrote about it, and this book after it, ask the same question. If the catastrophe is a means to a good end, the end is invisible and the means are thirty thousand dead. The satire grants the theory total explanatory power, then shows what that power costs. Readers who want the same technique aimed at a different orthodoxy should try A Modest Proposal, where Swift lets economic reasoning eat its own children.
Structurally the book is a road, and the road is the argument. Candide is expelled, shipped, shipwrecked, marched, and shipped again; each stop produces a story and each story produces a body count. The repetition is deliberate, because by the twentieth disaster the reader has stopped feeling surprise, which is exactly the condition the optimist is accused of. Twice Voltaire breaks his own machine. El Dorado, where children play quoits with emeralds and the king says “All men are free,” is a control experiment — a place where the theory is true — and the travellers leave it, because a world with nothing wrong in it has no plot. The Venetian chapter is the other exception: Pococurante, who owns everything and likes nothing, is given the book’s coldest speech. For the argument without the jokes, The Problems of Philosophy covers some of the same ground about evidence and belief.
Its afterlife has been long and argumentative. Nineteenth-century readers treated Candide as a naughty book, twentieth-century critics as the founding text of the modern political novel, and the phrase “the best of all possible worlds” is now used mostly by people who have never opened it. The book survives because it is funny in a way that does not date: the jokes are about institutions — armies, universities, inquisitions, stock exchanges, academies — and institutions keep reproducing the same material. It also survives because it is short; a reader can finish it in an evening and then spend a week arguing with it. If you want the travel-satire form at greater length and with a steadier narrator, Gulliver’s Travels is the obvious companion. The text used here is the Project Gutenberg transcription (#19942), in the public domain in the United States.
Historical Context
Voltaire wrote Candide in 1758 and published it at the start of 1759, in Geneva and at the same time in Paris, Amsterdam and London. The first printings were small and the book was pirated within weeks; there were several editions in the first year, and the author kept tinkering. The editors of this 1918 text bracket a long stretch of the Paris chapter and note that the 1759 printings carried only a page or so in its place, which is a reminder that Candide as we read it is the product of a series of revisions rather than of one sitting. Littell’s three-day story belongs to the legend that grew up around the book. What is certain is that it was written fast, in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake and in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, by a man hiding from the consequences of his own earlier books.
The first reception was scandal and sales. The book was denounced and banned in more than one city, it was placed on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, and it was reprinted everywhere; Voltaire, who had learned to deny the authorship of anything inconvenient, disowned it while making sure it circulated. The satire also had a specific occasion. Pope’s Essay on Man had made “whatever is, is right” a respectable sentiment in English, Leibniz’s Theodicy had given the same idea a technical vocabulary in German, and Voltaire had spent the 1750s watching both formulas fail in public — the earthquake, the war, and the execution of Admiral Byng, which he had tried and failed to prevent. The book’s reputation grew slowly: a succès de scandale in 1759, a school text by the twentieth century, which is a strange fate for a book that ends by recommending gardening.
This is the 1918 Modern Library translation, an anonymous English version reissued by Boni & Liveright with an introduction by Philip Littell, and it is the text most American readers met in the first half of the twentieth century. Its English is period English: Pangloss addresses his pupils as “thou,” the Inquisition hands out “san-benitos,” and Cunegonde’s name is printed without its accent throughout, which is why this page follows the book’s spelling. The version is faithful to the shape of the French — the short paragraphs, the abrupt chapter endings — though it flattens some of the puns and cannot reproduce the way the original slides between registers inside a single sentence. The Project Gutenberg file was produced in 2006 from that edition by Chuck Greif, Fox in the Stars and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team, with typographical corrections listed at the end of the book.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Candide: is a name and a temperament: candid, simple, and willing to believe whatever he is told by anyone with a title. The first paragraph says his face was “a true picture of his soul,” and Voltaire keeps him transparent so that the world can be seen through him. He is not stupid — he asks the right questions — but he asks them of the wrong people. His one violent act is a triple killing in Buenos Ayres, after which he says, “I have already killed three men, and of these three two were priests.” At the end he gives up arguing, which is the closest the book comes to a conversion.
- Pangloss: is the book’s engine. His name is built from the Greek for “all” and “tongue,” and his lecture in Chapter I parodies the argument from design: “the nose has been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles.” He is hanged, dissected and enslaved, and each time he returns with the same doctrine, insisting late in the book that “Leibnitz could never be wrong.” The comedy is that he is never cruel and never learns. He is a good man with a bad method, and Voltaire lets him explain the whole catastrophe of the plot as “a concatenation of events” on the last page.
- Cunegonde: is seventeen when the book begins, “fresh-coloured, comely, plump, and desirable,” and the plot treats her body as a currency: a Bulgarian captain, a Jewish merchant, a Grand Inquisitor and a governor all take a share. Her own account is strangely cheerful — “A modest woman may be ravished once, but her virtue is strengthened by it” — and that cheerfulness is the satire’s sharpest instrument, because it is the voice of someone who has learned to survive by narrating. When Candide finds her at last she is washing dishes on the Propontis, and he recoils three paces.
- Martin: is the Manichean Candide hires in Surinam, chosen because he is the “most dissatisfied with his state” of all the applicants. He is the anti-Pangloss, and for a while the book gives him the better lines: “God has abandoned it to some malignant being. I except, always, El Dorado,” and, of cultivated boredom, “there is some pleasure in having no pleasure.” The joke is that his pessimism is as unfalsifiable as the optimism it replaces. Nothing in the last ten chapters changes his mind, and he ends the book no happier than the man he is arguing with.
- The old woman: is a Pope’s daughter who has been ravished, enslaved and relieved of one buttock at the siege of Azof, and she is the most competent person in the book. She proposes the escape from Lisbon, she talks the Governor out of his plan, and she asks the question the philosophers cannot answer: which is worse, to have gone through all the miseries they have undergone, or to stay in one place with nothing to do? Her summary of the human position is the book’s most quoted sentence after the last one: “A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life.”
- Cacambo: is the practical intelligence the book keeps holding up against philosophy. He is a quarter Spaniard from Tucuman who has been “singing-boy, sacristan, sailor, monk, pedlar, soldier, and lackey,” and he talks the Oreillons out of eating the travellers by pointing out that a Jesuit is hardly worth the trouble. In El Dorado he asks the questions that get answers, and the errand to buy Cunegonde back is carried out without drama. He is the only character whose plans work, and Voltaire lets him retire from the argument without having to convert to anything.
Core Literary Themes
- Optimism as a way of not looking: Pangloss’s system is not stupid; it is unfalsifiable, which is worse. Every event confirms it, including the ones that kill people, and the running joke is the speed with which a disaster is converted into evidence. The pox that disfigures Pangloss is traced back through a chain of donors to Columbus’s crew and forward to the chocolate and cochineal that Europe enjoys, and the conclusion is that “private misfortunes make the general good.” That sentence is the target. Voltaire’s objection is not that the world contains evil but that a theory able to absorb any amount of it has stopped describing the world and started managing the people who live in it.
- The earthquake and the manufacture of a remedy: The Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755 killed tens of thousands, and Voltaire uses it as an experiment that cannot be argued away. The Inquisition’s answer is the book’s blackest joke: the University of Coimbra decides that “the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.” Candide is flogged in cadence while Pangloss is hanged, and the chapter ends with the question the rest of the book keeps trying to avoid: “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?” The objection is to the habit of turning other people’s deaths into proof that the system is sound.
- War, sugar and the colonial ledger: The political economy of the book is compressed into two scenes. In Chapter III the two armies sing a Te Deum after “this heroic butchery,” and the village Candide walks through afterwards has been burned “according to the laws of war.” In Chapter XIX a slave outside Surinam explains his missing hand and leg and delivers the line the whole Enlightenment quoted: “This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.” Voltaire joins the metaphysics to the money. The sugar in a Paris drawing room, the chocolate Pangloss credits to Columbus, the diamonds carried out of El Dorado — all of it arrives through violence, and the sentence “all is well” is spoken by the person who receives the goods.
- Talking rather than proving: Candide is built out of conversations, and the conversations are the argument. Candide asks Martin whether men have always been wicked; Martin says yes. Candide asks Pococurante whether he is happy; Pococurante says there is “some pleasure in having no pleasure.” Candide asks a dervish why the world is full of evil and is told to hold his tongue. The supper of the six deposed kings works the same way: the rulers of the earth sit down together and discover that they are all unemployed. Voltaire stages philosophy as manners — who interrupts, who changes the subject, who says nothing — and abstraction starts to look like what it is in practice, a thing people do with their mouths.
- Boredom, work and the garden: The last chapter is not a happy ending but a reduction of scale. Pococurante owns everything and is bored; the six kings have ruled the world and are bored; the Turk who asks the travellers to dinner has twenty acres and is not. His formula — “our labour preserves us from three great evils—weariness, vice, and want” — is the only advice in the book that anybody acts on. When Candide says “we must cultivate our garden,” he is not offering a philosophy of life but proposing a smaller unit of attention: a household, a plot, a day’s work. The final joke is that Pangloss immediately turns even this into another theory.
Related on editions.ink: A Modest Proposal — Swift’s deadpan proposal to eat the poor, three decades earlier; The Castle of Otranto — Walpole’s castle, where a giant helmet falls out of the sky; The Man Who Was Thursday — Chesterton’s London chase, another book about a world that runs on absurdity.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Candide?
This edition gives you the complete book in a clean, reflowable text, all thirty chapters with Voltaire’s mock-serious headings kept as the 1918 Modern Library edition printed them, from “How Candide Was Brought Up in a Magnificent Castle” to the farm on the Bosphorus. The 1918 introduction by Philip Littell is included at the front, so you get the book as its first American readers met it, argumentative preface and all. Nothing is abridged or modernised in the body of the text.
The files are DRM-free and come in three formats from a single page: EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for older Kindles, and KEPUB for Kobo devices. Each carries real chapter marks and a linked table of contents, which suits a book of thirty very short chapters: you can move from the Lisbon earthquake to El Dorado in two taps, or find the supper of the six kings without scrolling through a chapter you have already read.
The guide above is written for readers who want the context as well as the text: what Voltaire was answering, why the Lisbon earthquake mattered to the argument, and what the last sentence is and is not doing. Candide rewards a second pass — the jokes are dense and the plot is a machine — so read it once quickly and then come back to the chapters that seemed merely cruel. The notes add an hour of context: the earthquake, the Jesuit missions, the Admiral’s execution and the Paris quarrels all need naming before the jokes land.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #19942 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
- Formats included EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, DRM-free, each with a linked table of contents.
- Reading time about two hours at a steady pace, or one short chapter a night for a month.
- Chapter marks all thirty chapters, I to XXX, with the headings Voltaire set for them.
- A Modest Proposal — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Problems of Philosophy — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Gulliver’s Travels — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
Candide runs to thirty short chapters, each with a heading that announces its disaster. They fall into ten movements, and the summaries below follow them in order, saying where the story goes without giving the last page away.
- Chapters I–III — The castle, the war and the Anabaptist: Pangloss lectures on sufficient reason, Cunegonde drops her handkerchief behind a screen, and Candide is expelled from the castle with “great kicks on the backside.” A recruiting officer flatters his height, his own regiment flogs him, and he watches the Bulgarian and Abare armies destroy each other to the sound of military music. He reaches Holland, is turned away by a Protestant orator, and is taken in by James the Anabaptist, who drowns in Lisbon harbour as the earthquake begins. The recruiting officer’s pitch — that a man of his height and merit never pays — is the first of the book’s many sales talks.
- Chapters IV–VI — The pox, the storm and the auto-da-fé: Pangloss reappears as a beggar covered in sores and explains that Cunegonde is dead, the castle is destroyed, and his disease can be traced through a chain of donors to the New World. James is drowned, Lisbon falls, and the survivors argue about causes while the city burns. The Inquisition stages an auto-da-fé to stop further earthquakes; Candide is whipped and Pangloss is hanged. The chapter closes on Candide’s question about other possible worlds. Pangloss traces the disease’s lineage from a Franciscan friar to Columbus’s pilot and concludes that it is indispensable, since Europe would otherwise have neither chocolate nor cochineal.
- Chapters VII–IX — Cunegonde’s story and two murders: The old woman leads Candide back to Cunegonde, who is alive, kept by a rich Jew and shared with the Grand Inquisitor. She tells her story without self-pity — the Bulgarian captain, the sale, the arrangement by days of the week — and the reunion is interrupted twice, once by each of her keepers. Candide kills them both, the party rides for Cadiz on three Andalusian horses, and the old woman comes along although, as she says, she can sit only on one buttock.
- Chapters X–XII — The old woman’s life: Robbed in Cadiz by a friar, the party takes ship and the old woman tells her story: a Pope’s daughter, engaged to a prince who dies of chocolate, taken by corsairs, sold in Morocco, and then present at the siege of Azof, where a starving garrison is persuaded by its iman to cut a buttock from each of the women. Her conclusion is that she has endured more than anyone present, and that she has wanted to die a hundred times and gone on living.
- Chapters XIII–XV — Buenos Ayres and the Jesuit: The Governor of Buenos Ayres, who carries more surnames than anyone else in the book, takes one look at Cunegonde and proposes; the old woman advises her to accept and to keep Candide as a lover, since misfortune is a sufficient excuse. Candide and Cacambo flee to the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, where the Commandant turns out to be Cunegonde’s brother, alive and a priest. The reunion is warm until marriage is mentioned, and the Baron refuses on the ground of his seventy-two quarterings against the seventy-one of Candide’s supposed father. Candide runs him through.
- Chapters XVI–XVIII — The Oreillons and El Dorado: Two naked girls pursued by two monkeys turn out to be the monkeys’ mistresses, and Cacambo’s explanation earns the travellers a cannibal reception. He talks the Oreillons out of eating them by arguing that a Jesuit is not worth the trouble. They escape down a river that runs under vaulted rocks and arrive in El Dorado, where gold is gravel, the inn is free, the king says “All men are free,” and a hundred-and-seventy-two-year-old sage explains that the country has no law courts, no prisons and no monks.
- Chapters XIX–XXI — Surinam, the slave and Martin: Candide sends a fortune back to Europe and watches his sheep dwindle to a handful. Outside Surinam a slave missing a hand and a leg explains that this is the price of European sugar, and Candide renounces optimism — “it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong.” The merchant Vanderdendur cheats him, a magistrate fines him for making a noise, and he hires Martin, a Manichean, for the voyage. They argue about free will, watch a sea fight, and discuss France, which Martin calls a state of eternal war.
- Chapters XXII–XXIV — Paris, the Admiral and two Venetians: Paris is a sequence of swindles: a doctor who nearly kills him, a priest who asks for money for the other world, a marquise who cheats at cards, and an abbé who produces a forged letter from Cunegonde. A visit to the theatre turns into a quarrel about envy. He escapes to England and sees an admiral shot on his own quarterdeck “to encourage the others,” then reaches Venice, where Paquette is a prostitute, Friar Giroflée is her client, and both are miserable in exactly the way they were told they would not be.
- Chapters XXV–XXVII — Pococurante, the six kings and the galley: Pococurante shows the travellers his pictures, his library, his music and his garden, and dislikes all of it; Martin wins a bet that a happy man cannot be found. At supper six strangers turn out to be deposed kings, each with a story of a lost throne, and Candide gives the poorest of them a diamond. Cacambo returns with news that Cunegonde is washing dishes in Constantinople, and on the way there Candide recognises two rowers in a galley: Pangloss and the Baron.
- Chapters XXVIII–XXX — The reunion and the garden: The Baron explains how he survived the wound, became a Jesuit and then a slave; Pangloss explains how he survived hanging and dissection. At the farm Cunegonde has grown ugly, Candide recoils three paces, and the Baron refuses the marriage again. They consult a dervish, who tells them to hold their tongues, and an old Turk with twenty acres, who says that work keeps off three evils. The household divides the labour, Cunegonde becomes a pastry cook, and Candide stops arguing.
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Part of: Classic Fiction · Philosophy Classics
