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Voltaire Can elide, ZADIG and selected stories \ *n ^0, A SIGNE All* 6 Francois Marie Arouet De Voltaire FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE was born in 1694 of an aggressive Parisian bourgeois family. Educated by Jesuits, he was an excellent pupil but one quickl—y enraged by dogma. An earl—y rift with his father who wished him to study law led to his choice of letters as a career. Insinuating himself into court circles, he became notorious for lam- poons on leading notables and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille. By his mid-thirties, he had engaged in diplomatic espionage, which precipitated a four- year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later in France, of—Lettres philoso- phiques sur les Anglais—(1733) an attack on French Church and State forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from France. In this, his most prolific period, he wrote such satirical tales as "Zadig" (1747) and "Candide" (1759). His old age at Ferney, outside Geneva, was made bright by his adopted daughter, "Belle et Bonne," and marked by his intercessions in behalf of victims of political injustice. Sharp-witted and lean in his white wig, impatie—ntwith all appropriate rituals, he died in Paris in 1778 the foremostFrench author ofhis day. VOLTAIRE Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories Translated and with an introduction, by Donald M. Frame A StCNET CLASSIC Published by The New American Library A timeless taeasuny of the cuoold's gueat waitings. Signet Classics one especially selected and handsomely designed fon the living lihnaay of Che modean oeadeo. © Copyright 1961 by donald m. frame All rights reserved First Printing, May, 1961 A hardbound edition of this book is published by Indiana University Press. signet classics are published by The New American Library of World Literature, Inc. 501 Madison Avenue, New York 22, New York PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS INTRODUCTION VH Candide [1759] 15 Zadig[1747] 102 Micromegas [1752] 173 The World as It Is [1748] 192 Memnon [1749] 208 Bababec and the Fakirs [1750] 214 History of Scarmentado's Travels [1756] 217 Plato's Dream [1756] 225 Account of the Sickness, Confession, Death, and Apparition of the Jesuit Berthier [1759] 228 Story of a Good Brahman [1761] 240 Jeannot and Colin [1764] 243 An Indian Adventure [1766] 252 Ingenuous [1767] 255 The One-Eyed Porter [1774] 319 Memory's Adventure [1775] 325 Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goudman [1775] 329 NOTES AND GLOSSARY 347 SELECTIVE READING LIST 352 INTRODUCTION Characteristic ofall Voltaire's life were the acclaim and harassment that marked its close. At the age of eighty-three he returned to his native Paris for a triumph such as few authors have ever enjoyed. Delegations from the Academie Fran£aise and the Comedie Fran^aise, personages as diverse as Mme du Barry and Mme Necker, Diderot and Franklin, Gluck and the English ambassador, came to pay him their respects. Crowds cheered him in the streets. At the sixth performance of his tragedy Irene, he in his box and later his bust on the stage were crowned with wreaths amid wild acclaim. Yet he had come to Paris with no clear author- ization after twenty-four years of exile. When he died there ten weeks later (May 30, 1778) the religious authorities denied him burial, and his body was removed secretly at night to be interred in the abbey of Scellieres in Champagne. The oppressive power of Voltaire's opponents must be kept in mind if his tales are to appear in their true perspec- tive. Great satire creates the illusion that its targets are more comic than sinister. Imprisonments, exiles, a beating had whetted Voltaire's will to fight; the longer he lived the more constantly he used his wit to forge weapons of war. His tales, all written after he was fifty, are the weapons that have worn best. Their luster must not blind us, however, to the fact that when Voltaire died his long battle for liberty and justice was not won. The acclaim, like the harassment, came to Voltaire early as well as late. Francois-Marie Arouet, who adopted the nobiliary pen name "de Voltaire" at twenty-three, was born in 1694 of an intelligent, ambitious bourgeois family and given a strong classical education at the distinguished College Louis-le-Grand, where his Jesuit masters enjoyed his precocity and rated him as "a talented boy, but a notable scamp." He resisted his father's pressure to follow him into the law, and devoted himself early to literature. In the hedonistic society of the R—egency after the death of Louis XIV—(1715) he won renown also imprisonment and brief exile for his vu INTRODUCTION Vlll wit. In his twenty-fourth year he scored his first success as a tragedian with Oedipe (1718). Though even his best trage- dies, such as Zaire (1732), Mahomet (1742), and Merope (1743), are little more than documents today, for much of his life Voltaire's greatest fame was as the leading successor to Corneille and Racine in classical French verse tragedy, which he spiced with themes from Shakespeare and the East, colorful and violent visual effects, and thinly veiled social and religious criticism. Five years later he made another successful debut in the epic with La Henriade, today quite dated but enormously popular in its time, and still probably the best French epic in the classical mode. His subject was a lifelong hero, Henry IV, fighter for religious peace and tolerance in France and author (1598) of the Edict of Nantes. In 1725 a sneer at Voltaire by the Chevalier de Rohan led to a sharp reply, and this to a beating by lackeys directed by Rohan under the indifferent eyes of other aristocrats whom Voltaire had thought his friends. He challenged Rohan, who accepted; but on the morning set for the duel Voltaire was arrested and put in the Bastille, which he was allowed to leave two weeks later for an exile of over two years (1726-1729) in England. His exposure to English freedoms in his early thirties, following the harsh awakening to his lack of status in the eyes of French nobles, turned his mind to social inequalities as never before. He studied English hard and learned it rather well, made friends with Swift, Pope, Congreve, Bolingbroke, and others, and hailed English freedom of worship, thought, and speech, as well as the Quakers, Shakespeare, Bacon, Locke, Newton, and the parliamentary system, in his Philo- sophical Letters, or Letters Concerning the English Nation, whose long-delayed publication in 1734 brought about the burning of the book and a warrant for the author's arrest. The openness and power of his ironic attack on French abuses and inequities give this date great importance. Meanwhile Voltaire had triumphed in another field with his History of Charles XII (1731). Less important than two later works, The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and the Essay on the Manners and the Spirit of Nations (1756), which brought all civilization and all civilizations into the purview of history, his account of the Swedish warrior-king showed