Candide

[cahn]

[original source: These two threads.]

I finally broke down and bought Voltaire's Candide with proper footnotes so that I could read something by Voltaire now that I'm, like, reading his biography and helping to write fic about him and such :P I'd tried my completely-footnote-less copy last year at around this time, and gave up because although I was enjoying it, I could see that I was missing quite a lot.

I chose this one under the vague idea that "critical edition" was what I wanted, and also I read the sample and thought the footnotes were probably decent enough, whereas most other editions I tried in the five minutes I looked around had no footnotes. I don't know that I'm totally content with the notes now that I have them (they are sort of short) but they're actually not too bad for my uses, as I need them to explicate things I didn't know I was missing, and once I know I'm missing them I can go look them up or ask in salon :) It's the stuff I don't know I'm missing that bothers me...


A couple of notes:

Chapter 2 - The Bulgars - "Voltaire chose this name to represent the Prussian troops of Frederick the Great because he wanted to make an insinuation of pedastry against both the soldiers and their master. Cf. French bougre, English "bugger."

LOLOLOLOL. This is the kind of thing I'm here for, footnotes! Also as always I think it is hilarious that Voltaire is so stuck on Fritz that he has to make fun of Fritz being gay, lol.

"Two men in blue took note of [Candide]... 'Aren't you five feet five inches tall?'" And the footnote attached to that: "Frederick had a passion for sorting out his soldiers by size; several of his regiments would accept only six-footers."

...surely... they are mixing up Fritz and FW?? But still, this is 5000% funnier now that I know the Fritz/FW connection (tall guys, while sad for the tall guys, is always going to be hilarious to me)

[mildred_of_midgard responds: They may be, partially? But height requirements were a thing in Fritz's army (this is what Heinrich got dinged for--admitting recruits who didn't meet the requirements), and different regiments definitely had different requirements (and I do recognize five-five as a cutoff...for the cavalry, I think?). The six-foot regiment I'm not sure of; the Potsdam Giants (whose cutoff was six feet) got distributed into other regiments immediately after Fritz became king, and he certainly didn't have a passion for collecting every single tall soldier in Europe. But he may have had some regiments (grenadiers?) who had that as their height requirement. The editor may be confusing this part with FW, but I would be very reluctant to say so; it strikes me as at least 75% likely it's Fritz.

ETA: Further research tells me the Potsdam Giants were an entire regiment under FW, and downgraded to a battalion (of grenadiers--I was right about that part!) under Fritz. So maybe "several regiments" only accepting six foot men was an exaggeration, but there being six-foot requirements for some bodies is possible? Will let you know if I find out more. (Though I'm not going full-out detective on this, as I'm prioritizing other things.)]

The impressing of Candide into the army of the Bulgars by two guys who accost him in a tavern reminds me a lot of Ulrich Bräker's memoirs that selenak summarized for us a long time ago. I was going to ask if it was plausible that Voltaire had read his memoirs, but once I finally figured out the name of the guy and was thence able to look him up in rheinsberg, I saw that they were published much later than Candide. Well, I imagine he was just one of many.

Chapter 2/3: "The King of the Bulgars went to war with the King of the Abares." The footnote says here that this is a reference to the Seven Years' War and that "Allegorically, the Abares are the French, who opposed the Prussians in the conflict known to hindsight history as the Seven Years' War."

Me: The French?? Against the Prussians??
Footnote: Look, the Seven Years' War is complicated, okay? We are a footnote, we're not going to get all of this across in our allotted couple of lines. Check out the Battle of Minden, that's what he's referring to, it took place in Westphalia which is where Voltaire has set this bit.
Wikipedia: Yeah, your buddy Ferdinand of Brunswick defeated a French army there.
Me: He's not my buddy, I just thought it was funny that mildred thought of him before Ferdinand... never mind. Fine.

"...the two kings in their respective camps celebrated the victory by having Te Deums sung" -- Also appreciated the note about how this was sung to celebrate victory! By both kings, natch. Don't know if this was intentional, but it sure did remind me of Fritz for obvious reasons.



After we leave Westphalia and the Bulgars, in Chapter 11, the Old Lady says: "I am in fact the daughter of Pope Urban the Tenth and the Princess of Palestrina." The footnote observes that Voltaire left a note behind on this passage, first published in 1829: "Note the extreme discretion of the author: hitherto there has never been a pope named Urban X; he avoided attributing a bastard to a named Pope. What circumspection! What an exquisite conscience!" I don't know which I think is funnier, the "exquisite conscience!" or the fact that Voltaire is saying all this about himself in third person.

[selenak responds: re: footnotes - pretending to be just the editor for an unknown author was a literary device very popular in the 18th century, though usually in epistolary novels. Goethe did it in "Werther", for example, and Chloderos de Laclos in Les Liasons Dangereuses. It wasn't meant seriously. (EXcept in cases as when Voltaire used it when publishing pamphlets which could get him arrrested.) (And by MacPherson, the guy who wrote the Ossian poems.) Umberto Eco pays homage to the custom in The Name of the Rose which has an opening narration of him finding Adson von Melk's original manuscript. ]

Chapter 16: "How can you expect me to eat ham when I have killed the son of my lord the Baron, and am now condemned never to see the lovely Cunegonde for the rest of my life? Why should I drag out my miserable days, since I must exist far from her in the depths of despair and remorse? And what will the Journal de Trevoux say of all this?" I would have thought this was funny by itself, but the footnote says this is a journal published by the Jesuit order, founded in 1701 and consistently hostile to Voltaire. HEE.


Unfortunately no really good footnotes to share in the last half, although I will say that the footnotes make it clear that Voltaire continues to make fun of everyone whom he has any kind of conflict with. But some general thoughts/description, anyway:

As even my barbaric ahistorical self knew before reading it, the major idea of Candide is to rebut Leibniz's idea that this is the best of all possible worlds (which is the teaching of the absurd tutor Pangloss). He does this by having all kinds of terrible (and often hilarious) things happen to Candide, and Candide is also put in the path of many other characters (most interestingly the Old Lady and Martin the Manichee, the latter of whom I'll speak a bit more later) who also have horrible terrible (and again often hilarious, because this is Voltaire) things happen to them. And a couple of times Candide goes about trying to prove that someone in the world is happy -- but is always shown to be wrong. The idea is that this our most well-documented of all possible worlds (as John M. Ford once riffed on it, which I think is a hilariously brilliant way of putting it) could not possibly be the best of all possible worlds given that a) all these terrible things are happening, and b) they're happening to pretty much everyone; there is no one who is portrayed as happy in the book until the last chapter (with one notable exception which I will discuss).

Honestly, I felt like the strength of his arguments varied greatly. First, there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on Leibniz being disproved by terrible things happening to an individual person. I'd always conceived of "best of all possible worlds" to be a global condition rather than a local one: that is, one could certainly easily conceive of worlds where a particular person, or collection of people, had a better life than in this one, and my understanding of Leibniz's idea (which might be wrong?) is that it refers to everyone as a whole -- whatever that means (I haven't read Leibniz source; does he quantify happiness or utility of a world in a not-totally-undefined way?) -- that although at any particular moment a person or group of people might be unhappy, as a whole this is the best for humanity. Also that there might be constraints on what worlds are possible, e.g., if there hadn't been a horribly destructive earthquake at this time (one of the events in Candide, following real life), perhaps there would have been an even worse one. Or something. (I freely admit that I'm very influenced here by my religion having basically this as its theology, so I may be projecting the arguments.) (1)

Though one could argue that if everyone is unhappy (which as becomes more and more clear in the book is pretty much the case), then it couldn't possibly be the best of all possible worlds just because this seems unlikely to be it in absolute terms. But this doesn't seem to be the primary argument Voltaire is making, as far as I could tell (though it could very well be a secondary argument). I do think that he's saying that it is pretty easy to postulate a universe where, e.g., soldiers didn't rape Cunegonde; that universe would clearly be better than the book-canon universe where she was.

Speaking of which, Voltaire also makes a more explicit argument from counterexample: that this is not the best of all possible worlds because there is a best of a possible worlds that isn't this one. In the middle of the book Candide and his servant Cacambo somehow find themselves in the hidden-away and fabled land of El Dorado, which is a utopia where everyone is happy and no one cares about money, though their pebbles are precious stones and their mud is (literally) gold. Also, "Cacambo explained the king's witty sayings to Candide, and even when translated they still seemed witty. Of all the things which astonished Candide, this was not, in his eyes, the least astonishing." LOL. I wonder if this king writes poems that are actually good :PP

Candide and Cacambo decide to leave El Dorado in a stunningly stupid move (so Candide can find Cunegonde, whom he's been separated from) and take a bunch of gold and gems with them, which certainly make their life reasonably easier for the rest of the book, although Candide keeps losing money through various acts of stupidity (by him) and swindling (by others). Cacambo is dispatched to find Cunegonde, and Candide takes up with Martin the Manichee (whose name has come up before in salon). Manichaeism is the belief that there's evil as a tangible power in the world in addition to good/God (as opposed to the belief that an all-good God is the source of everything). Where Martin is concerned, in fact he's basically just a raging pessimist, and whenever Candide goes around thinking that he's found a happy person or a happy way of life, Martin is like "I bet no." (He is always right.)

At the end of the book, Candide finally finds Cunegonde (whom he's been searching for during most of the book), only to find that, horrors, during the course of her misfortunes she has become ugly. But he marries her anyway, because he feels obligated to. He's also run out of money by this time, and he ends up on a farm with a bunch of random people from the book, some of whom have shown up again after some time (including Pangloss, who seems to have died twice during the book, but both times his death was greatly exaggerated). They're all quarreling and terribly unhappy!! Until... on the last page, they meet a man who is actually happy (the first one in the entire book!), because he cultivates his small garden with his family. In the last few paragraphs Candide and the other characters decide to also cultivate their garden, and become what, if Voltaire were in fandom, I'd call a nice little found family :) (Whether this is a lasting happiness is left to the reader, and it does seem rather unlikely, though I like to imagine that they're all so tired of adventures at this point that they do keep going like that.)

Now that I've read Orieux (2) and know more about Voltaire's life and about how seriously he took work and his estate (garden) at Ferney, I think that... while we as readers may or may not imagine Candide and his compatriots to be happy, I think Voltaire was absolutely serious (or, you know, as serious as he ever got) about believing that cultivating one's garden was the only real route to happiness in this rather imperfect of all possible worlds.

(1) Robyn Arianrhod claims in Seduced by Logic: Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville that some commentators accuse him of confusing the phrase 'best possible world' with 'perfect world', and of simplistically poking fun at Leibniz's philosophy; on the other hand, his treatment of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755... suggests that he was using his powerful literary skill not merely to scoff but to strenuously reject the use of philosophy (and religious dogma) to explain away suffering. Which makes a lot of sense to me. Also, lol, called out.

(2) Orieux says of Candide, Out of the universal and irremediable scandal he fashioned Candide-a lively and entertaining tale that was taken to be licentious. He himself was slightly ashamed of it and called it a "Cożonnerie"-mere poppycock-to suggest that it was less scandalous than it seemed. But it is a work of nearly unfathomable despair. He had taken care to provide a few light touches, for total despair would have been excessive, and thus contrary to decorum, good taste, and humanity, which ought to be moderate in everything, even despair. If it had been exaggerated it would have been false, and Candide rings as true as crystal. It allows a smile, and in so doing saves humanity from despair. I agree with this too.