Candide and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)

352 Pages·2006·0.87 MB·English

oxford world’s classics
CANDIDE
and other stories
Voltaire was the assumed name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–
1778). Born into a well-to-do Parisian family, he was educated at the
leading Jesuit college in Paris. Having refused to follow his father and
elder brother into the legal profession he soon won widespread acclaim
for Œdipe (1718), the first of some twenty-seven tragedies which he
continued to write until the end of his life. His national epic La Henriade
(1723) confirmed his reputation as the leading French literary figure of
his generation. Following a quarrel with the worthless but influential
aristocrat, the Chevalier de Rohan, he was forced into exile in England.
This period (1726–8) was particularly formative, and his Letters concern-
ing the English Nation (1733) constitute the first major expression of
Voltaire’s deism and his subsequent lifelong opposition to religious and
political oppression. Following the happy years (1734–43) spent at Cirey
with his mistress Mme du Châtelet in the shared pursuit of several
intellectual enthusiasms, notably the work of Isaac Newton, he enjoyed
a brief interval of favour at court during which he was appointed
Historiographer to the King. After the death of Mme du Châtelet in 1749
hefinally accepted an invitation to the court of Frederick of Prussia, but
left in 1753 when life with this particular enlightened despot became
intolerable. In 1755, after temporary sojourn in Colmar, he settled at Les
Délices on the outskirts of Geneva. He then moved to nearby Ferney in
1759, the year Candide was published. Thereafter a spate of tragedies,
stories, philosophical works, and polemical tracts, not to mention a
huge number of letters, poured from his pen. The writer of competent
tragedies had become the militant embodiment of the Age of Enlighten-
ment. After the death of Louis XV in 1774 he eventually returned to
Paris in 1778 for the performance of his penultimate tragedy Irène. He
was acclaimed and fêted by the entire capital as the greatest living
Frenchman and as one of the most effective champions of freedom,
tolerance, and common sense the world had ever seen. He died there on
30 May 1778.
Roger Pearson is Professor of French in the University of Oxford and
Fellow and Praelector in French at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He is
the author of Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (1988), The
Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s ‘Contes philosophiques’ (1993),
Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (1996), Mallarmé
and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (2004), and Voltaire
Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (2005). For Oxford World’s
Classics he has translated Zola, La Bête humaine and Maupassant, A Life.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
VOLTAIRE
Candide
and Other Stories
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ROGER PEARSON
1
3
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Voltaire, 1694–1778.
[Short stories.English.Selections]
Candide and other stories / Voltaire; translated, with an introduction and notes,
by Roger Pearson.
p. cm.––(Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1.Voltaire, 1694–1778––Translations into English. I.Pearson, Roger. II.Title.
III.Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)
PQ20752006 843′.5––dc22 2005034736
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ISBN 0–19–280726–9 978–0–19–280726–7
1
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Translator’s Note and Acknowledgements xliv
Select Bibliography xlv
A Chronology of Voltaire xlviii
CANDIDE 3
MICROMEGAS 89
ZADIG 107
WHAT PLEASES THE LADIES 178
THE INGENU 190
THE WHITE BULL 254
Explanatory Notes 287
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INTRODUCTION
This edition presents a selection of the best of all possible stories by
Voltaire: Candide, Micromegas, Zadig, What Pleases the Ladies, The
Ingenu, and The White Bull. Each of them is a classic; but if ever a
work deserved to be called a World’s Classic, it is Candide. Published
simultaneously in Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam, London and probably
Liège on or around 20 February 1759, it soon became the bestseller
of the European book trade in the eighteenth century. Cramer, its
Genevan publisher, printed an initial run of 2,000 copies, the norm
for a book that was expected to sell well: within a month, after
further printings and many pirated editions, at least 20,000 copies
had been sold. After a similar period even Swift’sGulliver’s Travels
(published on 28 October 1726) had sold only half that number. The
first English translation came out within six weeks and sold at least
6,000 copies. Since then the work has been published in countless
editions. It has been translated into all the world’s major languages,
and repeatedly so in some cases as renewed efforts are made to
capture the elegance and vitality of Voltaire’s prose. Candide and
Pangloss are as well known as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; and
Leonard Bernstein turned them into the protagonists of a suc-
cessful comic opera.
The original publication of Candide was a carefully calculated
coup. Unbound copies of the work (in pocketbook duodecimo for-
mat) were discreetly dispatched from Geneva on 15 and 16 January
1759; 1,000 to Paris, 200 to Amsterdam, and others to London and
Liège. They were then bound at their respective destinations and
published on a previously agreed date, the idea being to circulate as
many copies of the original edition as possible throughout Europe
before pirated editions usurped and corrupted it (and, in those days
before the laws of international copyright, siphoned off Voltaire’s
potential profits). The aim, too, was to create the maximum stir in
as many countries as possible before the authorities could suppress
this subversive tale. In the event, although the police were quick to
seize all the copies they could and to smash any press on which a
new edition was being printed, the flood was too great for them to
stem. The damage was done––and long before the Vatican got
viii Introduction
round to placing Candide on its Index of forbidden books on
24 May 1762.
Voltaire himself observed great secrecy about the work, as indeed
he did about many of his stories. There is no mention of Candide in
his extant correspondence before the date of publication, and after-
wards he is to be found denying authorship and dismissing the tale as
nothing but a schoolboy joke. Sometime in 1758 he sent a manu-
script version to the Duchesse de la Vallière in Paris, which is now
preserved in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris; but he kept no
manuscript or printed version in his own library (which was sub-
sequently bought by Catherine the Great and is today still conserved
in St Petersburg). Nor did his publishers retain their printer’s copies.
By now ensconced in his chateau at Ferney on the French side of the
Franco-Genevan border, Voltaire was already to some extent proof
against police attention; but his circumspection over the publication
of Candide in part accounts for the fact that the authorities in Paris
and Geneva took no action against Voltaire personally even if they
did try in vain to contain the diffusion of his latest and most explo-
sive piece of writing.
For explosive it was––and is. Wordsworth may have called it the
‘dull product of a scoffer’s wit’, but he is considerably outnumbered
by those who have seen Candide as one of the key texts of the
Enlightenment. Moreover it is the supreme example of the conte
philosophique, or philosophical tale. Whether or not Voltaire invented
this genre is a moot point: admirers of Rabelais and Swift, and even
of Boccaccio and Cervantes, might dispute the claim. Unquestion-
ably, however, he devised a unique blend of shorter fiction and phil-
osophy (in its broadest sense). It is also clear that, whether or not the
conte philosophique already existed, Voltaire would have had to invent
it: for it proved the perfect medium of expression for the sceptic and
empiricist that Voltaire was. Deeply suspicious of metaphysics and
‘systems’, he was constantly appealing to the facts: fiction, para-
doxically, allowed him to show the ways in which the muddle and
miseries of life could not be reduced to neat, abstract theories. He
was able to avail himself variously of the traditional narrative struc-
tures of chivalric romance, of the traveller’s tale, and of the Oriental
tale, and to present a human being, usually a young man, beginning
to make his own way in life and learning the lessons of experience.
In this he was following the lead of the one work which influenced
Introduction ix
his thinking perhaps more than any other: Locke’s Essay concerning
Human Understanding (1690; translated into French by Coste in
1700). Locke describes his own philosophical method as being ‘his-
torical’ and ‘plain’ (I, i. 2); ‘historical’ because ideas are not innate
but arrived at by stages (‘the steps by which the human mind attains
several truths’: I, ii. 15, 16); and ‘plain’ because, in its uncorrupt
state, it is untrammelled by prejudice and preconception. ‘Candide’
and‘candidement’ (‘candid’ and ‘candidly’, from the Latin meaning
‘white’) recur frequently in Coste’s translation to convey this state of
openness to experience and readiness to base one’s judgements on
empirical evidence, to reason inductively rather than deductively.
For Voltaire, therefore, there was great narrative potential in the
discovery of truth, and no better way to present the process of its
discovery than as the voyage of a naive or ‘candid’ observer. Half of
the twenty-six prose tales he wrote employ the narrative device of
the journey, including all his major ones and four of the five presented
in this edition. Indeed this is how his career as a writer of contes
philosophiques began, for in 1739 Voltaire sent Frederick of Prussia a
manuscript copy of his Voyage du baron de Gangan. This manuscript
has been lost, but from the correspondence between Voltaire and
Frederick it is possible to infer that this work was essentially a proto-
type of Micromegas, which was eventually published thirteen years
later.
Micromegas
Micromegas dates originally, therefore, from the period when Voltaire
was living, in a ménage à trois, with Mme du Châtelet and her hus-
band at their home at Cirey some fifty miles from Nancy in eastern
France. Life with his mistress was as energetically intellectual as it
was amorous, and together they read, studied, and wrote over a
whole range of mathematical, scientific, philosophical, and literary
subjects. In fact they were being philosophes, or philosophers, in the
special eighteenth-century French sense of the word: namely, they
thought freely (i.e. independently of all religious or political author-
ity) throughout the entire field of human intellectual enquiry. They
were, as the etymology of the word indicates, lovers of knowledge
and, in those days before the specialist, rightly believed themselves
capable of understanding and contributing to the latest scientific