I.
The first time I read Candide I was in high school, and all I could remember was that Voltaire wrote it, that his life was as adventurous as the protagonist in his book, that there was a woman with only one buttock, a tutor named Pangloss and here, finally, was a book I could point at the “everything happens for a reason” people. Unfortunately, I knew a lot of them. I had also thrown around the phrase “toxic positivity” often enough that keeping a 250-year-old satire ready to win arguments with relatives was, I later realized, its own small Panglossism.
My great-aunt tried to instill this outlook in all the kids in our family. We would be watching her favorite TV drama, and an ad would come on asking us to donate to Oxfam, to strays, to wild and endangered animals, and she would turn to us and say, “This is why you have to finish all your food.” How my dinner plate was linked, via commercial advertising, to an endless number of organizations, I could never understand. The belief endures to this day.
Her line was not really “everything happens for a reason” in the cosmic sense. It was more like the reassignment of suffering into comfort by way of any available bridge. The bridge did not have to make sense. It only had to make the discomfort go away.
My first mistake was thinking Candide was Voltaire’s life in picaresque. My second was thinking it had one extractable lesson. Both mistakes do what Pangloss does. They force a fictional mess to submit to a single cause. The book is centered around optimism, but as a mood. What Candide takes apart is the compulsion to explain, the inability to look at a plain fact and say, “That happened, and it was bad, and there is nothing more to add.” Pangloss cannot do it. My great-aunt cannot do it. Candide was cathartic to me because Voltaire can, though it took me two more rereads, across two translations, to work out what he wants us to do instead. What does the garden mean? Is there an answer?
II.
Candide starts in the most fairytale way. He is a gentleman of “sweet disposition,” and “his face was the true index of his mind.” He is raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, rumored to be the son of the Baron’s sister and some lower-born local, a man she refused to marry because he could prove only seventy-one of the seventy-two quarterings of nobility a Baron’s family demands. Candide is schooled alongside the beautiful Miss Cunégonde and their tutor Pangloss, who teaches “metaphysico-theologico-cosmonigology,” a mash-up of the philosophers Voltaire wants in his crosshairs, Leibniz above all, but also Pope, Descartes, and Hobbes. Leibniz is the main target, though what Voltaire satirizes is flattened theodicy. A good and all-powerful God made this world; therefore, this world is the best one possible.
What Pangloss does, scene by scene, is draw cause and effect. The nose was formed to wear spectacles; therefore, we wear spectacles. Legs were shaped for stockings. Stones were made to build castles. Every fact gets a reason welded to it. This explains why the book can feel so cartoonishly shallow while also incredibly violent. Candide sees no cause to doubt any of it. Cunégonde is the most beautiful girl, and he gets to see her daily. Pangloss is the greatest philosopher, and he gets to be taught by him. This is plainly the best of all possible worlds. It is the last peaceful scene in the book. We do not return to anything like it until the final page, because it ends with Candide kicked out of the castle for kissing Cunégonde over a dropped handkerchief. Behold Pangloss’s cause, and the long avalanche of effects to come.
What follows is the picaresque, and it must’ve been intended to exhaust the reader. Candide is conscripted by the Bulgarians and sentenced, for the crime of going for a walk, to a choice between being beaten thirty-six times by every man in the regiment or shot in the head. He is saved at the last second by the king himself, who happens to be strolling past. The miraculous timing becomes the comic fabric of the story. War is declared, and Candide hides in a corner of the battlefield “like a philosopher” while “rifle fire removed from this best of all worlds some nine to ten thousand wretches who’d been infecting its surface.” He walks off through the aftermath, slaughtered limbs, scattered brains, disemboweled girls, the first appearance of sexual violence against women that recurs throughout the book, and makes for Holland, “having heard it said that everyone in this country was rich, and was also Christian.”
Holland is where the religious satire opens. A devout couple refuse Candide food because he will not confirm whether the Pope is the Anti-Christ. He simply has not heard, and he is hungry. The book sorts its minor characters into two piles, the charitable and the wretched, and the charitable ones rarely come from where doctrine says they should. It is the Anabaptist Jacques who takes Candide in. Then Pangloss resurfaces as a beggar, the first of many characters who bob back up, and reports that Cunégonde has been disemboweled and “raped as many times as conceivably possible,” the whole family slaughtered. Pangloss has, of course, an explanation. The cause was love. Candide’s kiss set the chain in motion.
As the facts get worse, Pangloss explains harder. He has contracted syphilis, and rather than say, “I am sick, and it is bad,” he traces its genealogy backward, a servant, a friar, a countess, a cavalry captain, a Marquise, a page, a Jesuit, all the way to a comrade of Christopher Columbus, and concludes that “if Columbus hadn’t picked it up, on some island in the Americas... we would never have had either chocolate or cochineal dye.” The explanations are bandages that work only on Candide.
Voltaire keeps testing Pangloss against reality, and the tests keep getting harder. Jacques drowns in Lisbon harbor saving an unsavory sailor, and Pangloss explains that the harbor was “created expressly so that the Anabaptist could drown in it.” Then comes the Lisbon earthquake. Thirty thousand dead, three-quarters of a city flattened, the kind of fact a theodicy cannot route around. Pangloss tries anyway, with a vein of sulfur running underground from Lima, with the necessity of the quake being exactly here and not elsewhere, all for the best. The sailor, busy looting the dead, gives the only honest reply in the scene, “God damn it to hell! You’ve found the right man, you and your universal reason.”
Voltaire never disproves Pangloss. He does something worse to him. By the third or fourth fresh atrocity, the explanation itself has become the obscenity, and you stop wanting a better argument. You want Pangloss to be quiet. Then Lisbon, hoping to stave off a second quake, stages an auto-da-fé, and the antisemitism Voltaire is documenting is undisguised. Men are burned, two of them suspected of being Jews for the crime of picking the bacon out of a roast chicken. Pangloss is hanged. For the first time, watching his tutor die, Candide’s faith cracks. Cunégonde, it turns out, is alive. The dead keep returning, and she is currently time-shared between a Jewish businessman and the Grand Inquisitor, the week split along the Sabbath. Candide kills them both. The old woman who serves Cunégonde is the one I remembered from high school, because it is on the horseback escape that we learn she has only one buttock.
The old woman out-suffers everyone. A Pope’s daughter, betrothed to a prince, she is dragged through a sequence of catastrophes so total it loops back into comedy. The eunuch who nurses her back to health then sells her in Algeria rather than send her home. At the siege of Azov, her buttock is carved off to feed starving Turkish soldiers, who are then wiped out anyway the moment the meal ends. After all of it, she delivers the line that is the book’s true counter-philosophy.
“A hundred times I wanted to kill myself, but I loved life too much. ...is there anything stupider than wanting to go on carrying a burden you constantly long to throw to the ground?”
She does not explain her suffering, and she does not deny it. She just keeps going, clear-eyed, with no theory at all. She proposes the only honest experiment in the book. Ask every passenger on the ship for his story, and if you find one who has never cursed his life, throw her into the sea.
III.
The misadventures accelerate. Buenos Aires, where Cunégonde is advised to marry a governor for his fortune. Cunégonde’s Baron brother, supposedly dead, is so repulsed that a man with only seventy-one quarterings would marry his seventy-two-quartering sister that Candide runs him through too. Cacambo, Candide’s valet, delivers a line that could come from a venture capitalist’s post today. “When you can’t make a splash in one world, you find yourself a different one. It’s great fun, seeing and doing new things.”
Then they stumble into El Dorado, where gold and jewels lie in the road like gravel, and I felt, for a paragraph, exactly like Pangloss, agreeing with Candide that this hidden Inca kingdom “must be the country where everything is indeed for the best, since there absolutely has to be a place of that sort.” It has one religion and needs no prayer, no courts, no parliament, the whole place running smoothly on agreement. El Dorado does not need a verdict. Candide leaves. He has found, on its own terms, the best possible world, and he walks out because Cunégonde is not in it and status is worthless where everyone already has everything. Even the best possible world turns out not to be the world Candide wants. Outside, robbed and cheated and watching his Eldorado sheep die, he finally defines optimism as “the madness of insisting that everything is good when it’s bad.”
Candide’s next companion is Martin, a scholar from Amsterdam, a pessimist, a true philosophical mirror of Pangloss, and a rather gloomy man. He sees what Pangloss cannot. When Candide cheers a pirate ship sinking, Martin points at the senseless suffering. “But was it necessary that the passengers on board his ship die with him? God punished this scoundrel; the devil drowned the others.” His worldview is a catalogue of endless warfare, Jesuits against Puritans, writers against writers, husbands against wives, and when Candide asks whether these are not just shadows in a lovely painting, Martin answers that “your shadows are really ghastly stains.”
But Martin also has a single fixed theory that pre-explains every fact. He is Pangloss inverted. The only point where Candide truly believes him is when it looks like he will never see Cunégonde again, which is to say, Martin is also just a mood.
In Venice they meet Paquette, the syphilis-origin servant, now a miserable prostitute beside an equally miserable monk. They also meet Lord Pococurante, a Venetian senator rumored never to have known sorrow, the living image of success. His palace is magnificent. His mistresses are beautiful. He owns a Raphael he finds untrue to nature, sits through chamber music that sounds to him like noise, and keeps a vast library that bores him. Candide, still half-Pangloss, decides Pococurante must be happy because he can find the flaw in everything other men admire.
Pococurante already has the thing everyone else is chasing. Wealth, beauty, leisure, the comfortable world delivered to his door. And he is restless inside it. When Candide tours his actual gardens and finds them beautiful, the senator says he will tear them up tomorrow and replant “according to a far grander pattern.”
IV.
The misadventures wind down. Pangloss and the Baron turn up alive again, both grotesquely battered, both completely unchanged. Pangloss, asked how his philosophy survived his own hanging and near-dissection, says that “it wouldn’t be right for me to disown myself; Leibniz cannot have been wrong.” Candide finally reaches Cunégonde, but she has become ugly. The desire that drove the entire book, every killing, every ocean crossing, the walk out of Eldorado, simply evaporates. He marries her anyway, mostly out of spite at her archaic brother, who still objects on grounds of quarterings and gets shipped back to the galleys for his trouble. The vanity that began it all is the last thing standing.
They buy a small farm, and the old woman asks the question the whole book has been walking toward. Which is worse, “I should like to know which is worse, to be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run a Bulgar gauntlet, to be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to row in a galley, to experience—finally—all the miseries we all have endured, or simply to stay here with nothing to do” Candide’s answer is the most honest line he speaks. “That’s quite a question.” Then the famous ending. Pangloss, incurable, links the entire chain one last time. If Candide had not been kicked out of the castle, run the Baron through, and lost the Eldorado sheep, “you wouldn’t be eating, here and now, lemon-peel preserves and pistachios.” Candide replies that “that’s well said, but we need to work our fields.”
For a long time, I read that, and most readers seem to read it, as a cure. The answer to my great-aunt, to toxic positivity, to compulsive explanation. Stop explaining and pick up a rake. We must cultivate our gardens.
Two and a half centuries of readers have tried to extract the garden scene. The most persuasive reading I found belongs to Philip Stewart[3], who reads the garden not as a cure for suffering and not as a model society either. He reads it as a small, protected place where the big metaphysical questions are set down because they are unanswerable and exhausting, where collective work keeps boredom, vice, and desire at bay. The Baron is sent back to the galleys, on this reading, not out of cruelty but because he is still intolerant, still ranking everyone by quarterings, and the garden has no room for a man who resists collectivity.
But I keep going back to Pococurante. Look at what has happened to Candide by the last page. Cunégonde has become ugly, and the enormous desire that drove every killing and every ocean crossing simply is not there anymore. He marries her without passion, but he seems, for the first time in the book, absorbed, not in a woman, or philosophy, but in the work in front of him. The fields need doing, so he works them.
Candide teaches, but does not preach, that no one owns the truth. I cannot help that Voltaire meant for readers of this tale to approach as Pococurante does his library: “I read only for myself; what I love is only what I can use.”