A modern satirist would not try to paint with Voltaire’s quick brush the doctrine that he wanted to expose. Pangloss, to prove the existence of design in the universe, says that noses were made to carry spectacles, and so we have spectacles. Colored birds would have filled Paraguay with their silver or acid cries.ĭr. We should have had quarter distances, far horizons, the altering silhouettes of an Ionian island. When Martin and Candide were sailing the length of the Mediterranean we should have had a contrast between naked scarped Balearic cliffs and headlands of Calabria in their mists. A modern writer would have tried to catch and fix in words some of those Atlantic changes which broke the Atlantic monotony of that voyage from Cadiz to Buenos Ayres. It would have been, among other things, a book of sights and sounds. Yet how different the book would have looked if Voltaire had written it a hundred and fifty years later than 1759. Voltaire wrote it in three days, and five or six generations have found that its laughter does not grow old. CANDIDE By VOLTAIRE INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP LITTELL BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.Įver since 1759, when Voltaire wrote “Candide” in ridicule of the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds, this world has been a gayer place for readers.
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