Novella: Candide

Overview
Voltaire’s 1759 novella follows the wide-eyed Candide as he stumbles through a world of war, disaster, cruelty, and chance, testing the sunny metaphysics of his tutor Pangloss, who insists they live in “the best of all possible worlds.” A rapid picaresque spanning Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire, the story skewers philosophical optimism, religious hypocrisy, colonial violence, and aristocratic pretension, while inching toward a pragmatic ethic summed up in the closing line: “we must cultivate our garden.”

Plot
Candide grows up in the baron’s castle in Westphalia, raised on Pangloss’s doctrine that everything happens for a reason and for the best. Caught kissing the baron’s daughter Cunégonde, he is expelled, conscripted by the brutal Bulgars, and witnesses the savagery of war. Escaping to Holland, he meets the compassionate Anabaptist Jacques and a destitute Pangloss, who explains that the castle was destroyed and Cunégonde slain. The trio sail to Lisbon, where an earthquake levels the city; amid a superstitious auto-da-fé staged to ward off tremors, Jacques drowns and Pangloss is hanged.

An old woman leads Candide to the miraculously surviving Cunégonde, now kept by two men, a Grand Inquisitor and the merchant Don Issachar. Candide kills both and flees with Cunégonde and the old woman to the New World. In Buenos Aires, the governor claims Cunégonde; Candide escapes south with the loyal valet Cacambo, who guides him into Paraguay. There they meet Cunégonde’s brother, now a Jesuit commander. When the brother forbids Candide from marrying Cunégonde due to his low birth, Candide impulsively stabs him and flees into the jungle.

Captured by the Oreillons and released through a misunderstanding, Candide and Cacambo stumble into Eldorado, a secluded land of reason, religious tolerance, and abundance where gold is worthless. Surfeited with hospitality yet longing for Cunégonde and reputation, Candide leaves Eldorado with pack-laden sheep. Reentering the corrupt world, he is swindled by a merchant in Suriname and watches his fortune vanish. He hires the embittered scholar Martin to accompany him across the Atlantic.

In Paris and then Portsmouth, they observe fashionable charlatans and the execution of an admiral to “encourage the others.” In Venice, Candide searches in vain for Cacambo and Cunégonde, encountering Paquette and Brother Giroflée sunk in misery despite sudden wealth. At last Cacambo appears as a slave, revealing Cunégonde is in Constantinople. En route east, Candide discovers Pangloss alive, he survived the hanging, and rescues both him and the resurrected brother from the galleys.

In Constantinople, Cunégonde has grown coarse through hardship, but Candide honors his promise to marry her. He buys freedom for his companions, and the motley group retires to a small farm.

Themes
The whirlwind of calamities punctures abstract optimism by confronting it with war, natural catastrophe, judicial cruelty, and enslavement. Each companion embodies a stance toward suffering: Pangloss rationalizes, Martin expects the worst, Cacambo navigates pragmatically, and the old woman reflects on endurance. Eldorado supplies the counterfactual: a rational utopia that makes European pretensions look perverse, yet even there Candide’s restlessness persists.

Ending
After hearing the discourse of a contented Turkish farmer who avoids vice and ennui by working, the group abandons metaphysical systems for modest labor. Candide concludes that human flourishing depends less on grand explanations than on limited, useful work and mutual sustenance: “we must cultivate our garden.”