Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories

by Voltaire, Francois; Frame, Donald M.; Frame, Donald M.

• ISBN13: 9780451524263
• ISBN10: 0451524268
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1961-05-01
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

Voltaire, France's most distinguished man of letters, entertained readers while deriding the bureaucracies of his day with savage contempt, creating exotic panoramas in his satirical stories, sixteen of which are presented in this volume. This indispensable collection features the author's masterpiece, Candide.

Candide parodies the classic, romantic coming-of-age story, with the naive, ever-optimistic title character confronting the evils of the real world. His forbidden love of a baron's daughter causes Candide to be evicted from his home and sheltered life into a desolate sixteenth-century Europe -- where the strong prey on the weak and misery abounds in the heart of humanity. With Candide and the other stories in this collection, the master of social commentary dissects science and spiritual faith, ethics and legal systems, love and human vanity.

Author Biography

François-Marie Arouet, writing under the pseudonym Voltaire, was born in 1694 into a Parisian bourgeois family. Educated by Jesuits, he was an excellent pupil but one quickly enraged by dogma. An early 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 lampoons on leading notables and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille.

By his mid-thirties his literary activities 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 philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733)—an attack on French Church and State—forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. 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, impatient with all appropriate rituals, he died in Paris in 1778—the foremost French author of his day.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Candide [1759]	15	(87)
Zadig [1747]	102	(71)
Micromegas [1752]	173	(19)
The World as It Is [1748]	192	(16)
Memnon [1749]	208	(6)
Bababec and the Fakirs [1750]	214	(3)
History of Scarmentado's Travels [1756]	217	(8)
Plato's Dream [1756]	225	(3)
Account of the Sickness, Confession, Death, and Apparition of the Jesuit Berthier [1759]	228	(12)
Story of a Good Brahman [1761]	240	(3)
Jeannot and Colin [1764]	243	(9)
An Indian Adventure [1766]	252	(3)
Ingenuous [1767]	255	(64)
The One-Eyed Porter [1774]	319	(6)
Memory's Adventure [1775]	325	(4)
Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goudman [1775]	329	(18)
Notes and Glossary	347	(5)
Selective Reading List	352