Candide by Voltaire
After the outbreak of the Seven Years War, Voltaire’s sense of the absurd aspect of warfare evolves considerably. Tales in that vein from the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha (D7040) might have heightened that impression, just as the Byng episode undoubtedly did. By February 1757 the acid tones of Candide are evident in a letter to the Englishman George Keate when Voltaire writes à propos of Byng: ‘Your sailors are not polite,’ going on: ‘If you want to see some fine battles, Germans killed by Germans and a few towns pillaged, it is up to you to enjoy this little entertainment in the spring’ (D7162). In June 1757 the same spirit of sarcasm appears in a letter to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. There would be much unhappiness, he tells her, if the warring armies did not destroy at least fifty towns, reduce some fifty thousand families to beggary, and kill four or five hundred thousand men. ‘We cannot yet say “All is well” but it is not going badly, and with time Optimism will be conclusively proven’ (D7297).
In early 1757, then, the essential tone of Candide is already present in Voltaire’s mind. Other details too are beginning to appear in his letters. The final destination of Candide and his little band in the garden outside Constantinople is already foreshadowed in March 1757, when Voltaire cites a comparison between the view he has over the lake from Lausanne with a similar outlook in Constantinople (D7213). The writer who had drawn this parallel, so suggestive to Voltaire’s imagination, was the seventeenth-century explorer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who had travelled widely in the East before retiring to Switzerland not far from Voltaire’s house in Lausanne. Louis XIV had been offended that Tavernier had settled in Switzerland, to which he had replied that he wanted to own something that belonged entirely to him. Not surprisingly, Voltaire felt a kinship with this earlier Frenchman who had also shaken the dust of France from off his feet in order to find genuine independence; he adds that ‘I am finishing up as he did’ (D7215). One sees here a complex interweaving of elements. Lausanne view = Constantinople view, thanks to Tavernier. As Voltaire is retired and free outside France, so too Candide in his final retreat in Turkey. Whether yet consigned to paper, the lineaments of the dénouement to the conte are all mentally in place by March 1757.
On 26 October 1757 Voltaire laments the death of Patu, who had visited him two years before. His obituary notice is simple and touching: ‘il aimait tous les arts, et son âme était candide’ (D7434).4 Thus appears our hero’s name. When Voltaire introduces it at the beginning of the conte the conjunction is much the same: ‘Sa physionomie annonçait son âme … on le nommait Candide.’5 A vital step in the creation of the conte is prefigured here. Shortly afterwards on 9 November 1757 Thieriot is writing to Voltaire saying that they are as ignorant as ‘des souris dans un vaisseau de l’intention de ceux qui le conduisent’ (D7456).6 This, as we have seen, is not the first time the image has come to Voltaire’s mind, as he had himself used a similar expression to Frederick in 1736. But Thieriot probably refreshed Voltaire’s memory at a crucial moment, and his influence is seen in one of the most trenchant observations in Candide about divine Providence: ‘Quand Sa Hautesse envoie un vaisseau en Egypte, s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans le vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non?’7
Another important detail is added to the genesis of Voltaire’s conte at the end of November 1757 when he receives a letter from the Margravine of Bayreuth describing the battle of Rossbach. She wrote:
Cette armée [i.e., prussienne] … fut rangée en ordre de bataille sur une ligne. Alors l’artillerie fit un feu si terrible que des Français … disent que chaque coup tuait ou blessait huit ou neuf personnes. La mousqueterie ne fit pas moins d’effet. Les Français avançaient toujours en colonne pour attaquer avec la baïonnette … L’infanterie … fut taillée en pièces et entièrement dispersé.
(This [Prussian] army was drawn up in battle order along a line. Then the artillery laid down such a terrible barrage that Frenchmen say … each shot killed or wounded eight or nine people. The musketry was no less efficacious. The French were still advancing in columns to attack with the bayonet … The infantry … were cut to pieces and totally scattered.)
(D7477)
This must surely be at the origin of Voltaire’s account in Candide of the battle between the Bulgares and the Abares:
Rien n’était si beau, si leste, si brillant, si bien ordonné que les deux armées.… Les canons renversèrent d’abord à peu près six mille hommes de chaque côté; ensuite la mousqueterie ôta du meilleur des mondes environ neuf à dix mille coquins qui en infectaient la surface. La baïonnette fut aussi la raison suffisante de la mort de quelques milliers d’hommes.
(Nothing was as beautiful, as sprightly, as well ordered as the two armies.… The cannon first of all knocked over about six thousand men on either side; next the musketry removed from the best of worlds around nine to ten thousand rascals who were infecting its surface. The bayonet was also the sufficient cause of the deaths of a few thousand men.)
The order of details is the same: the military line-up, the artillery, musketry, bayonet. Voltaire simply transforms an honest and poignant account into a display of ironic brilliance. The rôles are similarly distributed in both passages, and the overall effect of utter devastation is the same. But at Rossbach only the French were routed. It is part of Voltaire’s strategy to ensure that both sides in his absurd and horrible battle are shot to pieces. The Margravine is able to offer further help a week later when writing to Voltaire about the starving soldiers who have fled after the defeat at Rossbach and are now wandering about everywhere (D7483). This time the impact upon Candide is less impressive, but it is true that Candide too flees without direction and runs out of food.
Such are the details that have begun to accumulate by the beginning of December 1757. At the turn of the year the number of parallels increases strikingly. Voltaire’s bitter memory of the Frankfurt incident where his niece had ‘Four bayonets … in the stomach’ (D7521) is renewed, as we have noticed, after Frederick had triumphed at Rossbach. This may be the starting point for the knife wound which the heroine of the conte Cunégonde receives in the side (Chapter 8) or the account of her disembowelling by Bulgarian soldiers (Chapter 4). Voltaire advises the Genevan clergy not to react to the Encyclopédie article ‘Genève’: ‘Que faut-il donc faire? Rien, se taire, vivre en paix …’ (D7536, 27 December [1757]).8 The similarity is close with the dervish’s brusque reply to Pangloss, who wants to know the truths of metaphysics: ‘Que faut-il donc faire? dit Pangloss. —Te taire, dit le derviche.’9 In January 1758 Voltaire is telling the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha that Prussians and the like are ‘the children of the evil principle’ (D7554); we see here a further premonition of the Manichean Martin in Candide, who believes that God has abandoned this world to some evil being and cites war as one of his strongest arguments for believing so. At the same time Voltaire is working on his history the Essai sur les moeurs. The topics to which he specifically refers include the English colonies in America and the Jesuits in Paraguay (D7559). Both enter into the make-up of Candide, Paraguay directly (Chapter 14) and the State of Pennsylvania in the disguise of Eldorado (Chapter 18), that Utopia where, as in Pennsylvania, there are no judges, doctors or priests. Just as, in Eldorado, the natives build a machine ‘pour guinder [to hoist]’ Candide and his companion Cacambo out of Eldorado, so too does Voltaire on 26 January 1758 use the same somewhat uncommon verb in writing that ‘we would hoist’ a visitor over the mont Cenis to Turin if he should wish to pass by Geneva (D7603).
On 8 January 1758 a reference to the efficient manoeuvres of Frederick’s troops, including ‘le pas redoublé [at the double]’ (D7565), compares with the well-drilled Bulgar in Candide who also knew how to ‘doubler le pas’ (Chapter 2). Reference to the auto-da-fé recurs in a letter of 12 January (D7579). On the 15th mention is made of the mosques in Constantinople, as too of the Sultan’s officers with the exotic title of ‘azamoglans’ (D7584); Cunégonde’s brother is sent to the galleys for being found bathing with ‘un jeune icoglan,’ and Pangl
These details, by their nature fragmentary, need to be assembled if one is to obtain a comprehensive view of Voltaire’s state of mind during the period between late October 1757 and early March 1758. His letters, we can see, are full of allusions that are taken up, often without any virtual reworking, in Candide. The conte must have been taking shape in his mind during those months. More specifically, the passages cluster around certain areas of the story: the opening, and particularly the battle; the Eldorado episode; the appearance of Martin soon afterwards; and the concluding sections in and around Constantinople. Equally interesting, direct echoes of Candide more or less vanish from Voltaire’s correspondence after the beginning of March 1758 and do not reappear until he pays a visit to the Elector Palatine at Schwetzingen four months later.
This visit, which takes him away from Geneva in July 1758 for about five weeks, appears to coincide with a change in Voltaire’s mood that has not been sufficiently noted by his biographers. Until his departure he had led a relatively contented existence. A visitor to Geneva just before he left remarks on how he seemed younger, happier, healthier than before his stay in Prussia (D7784). But even so, a period is coming to an end in Voltaire’s life. The disappointments with the Genevan clergy have had their effect and he wishes to leave the territory where they hold sway. The search is on once more to find a property which combines the maximum of security and independence. He thinks of Lorraine, which he had last seen at the time of Mme du Châtelet’s death; as he writes to Saint-Lambert from Schwetzingen, he would like to place himself under the protection of King Stanislas (D7795). But though the latter appears to have been personally sympathetic to the proposal, he was well aware that he could not afford to sanction it without first seeking the approval of his son-in-law Louis XV (cf. D7787). The latter was to reply in August to Stanislas, clearly intimating his coolness on the matter (D7787, Commentary); and Voltaire thereafter was to look elsewhere for a home.
The visit to Schwetzingen, reluctantly undertaken, was made apparently with business in mind in order to invest money for optimum benefit. Perhaps Voltaire’s maritime losses through the activities of the British Navy had made the excursion indispensable. However, the journey permitted him also to sound out a number of influential people about returning to Lorraine or France, and this in the end may have been the more important reason. Whatever the precise motives, it is clear that uncertainty about his future has re-entered Voltaire’s life. For a period he is transported back to the climate of insecurity that prevailed during the years immediately preceding installation at Les Délices. Hopes of a return to Paris flicker briefly, and for that he is willing to do obeisance to the French King (e.g. D7762). But the nomadic life no longer brings him any pleasure at all. Although well fêted at Schwetzingen, he is also miserable and lonely. One of his letters to Mme Denis13 is a cri de coeur such as has not been heard in his correspondence for some years: ‘No letters from you, it is heart-breaking, it is abominable. I write to you daily, and you abandon me. I have never missed you so much and never been so angry with you’ (D7803). It is the eloquent complaint of a man homesick for Les Délices and above all for the one person there whose company is essential to him.
Was Candide elaborated under such unhappy circumstances? Did Voltaire perhaps take with him a sketch, drafted out some months before, such as we now know preceded the composition of L’Ingénu? If so, he had probably written at least some sections in greater detail, as we have seen. But the composition of Candide may essentially date from the visit, when ample leisure time would have been available for it. It seems quite possible, as Voltaire’s secretary appears to have made the first copy of the conte while at the château, the author then presenting it to his host. But the work was not necessarily finished even then, and one biography of Voltaire recounts an incident, which must remain unverifiable, to the effect that it was completed in three days’ concentrated work back at Les Délices. However, Schwetzingen would seem to mark an important milestone in the genesis of the tale. When Voltaire wrote to Countess Bentinck in mid-August on his return journey that he had much to tell her when he saw her, adding that ‘notre roman est singulier’ (D7825)14 he may well have been referring obliquely to Candide as much as to personal experiences. At any rate, the phrase he uses: ‘nous reprendrons le fil de nos aventures [we shall pick up the thread of our adventures]’ is echoed by Voltaire’s observation in Candide about Cunégonde’s narration of her own troubles: ‘Elle reprit ainsi le fil de son histoire.’15
Unless Candide were virtually finished before Voltaire’s visit to Schwetzingen, which appears unlikely, one must view it as written not simply in a state of ambivalent feelings about Paris and Geneva nor as a work of detached irony by a happy man but as the composition of someone who was once more plunged into despairing gloom. When he returned to Geneva he received definitive news from d’Argental that Mme de Pompadour had declared him persona non grata at Court. Besterman rightly notes: ‘it is from this moment that can be dated his spiritual severance from his fatherland’ (D7836, Commentary). A genuine sadness prevails in this letter, betokening the same kind of personal vulnerability as he had shown at Schwetzingen regarding Mme Denis. The buoyancy which had been uppermost even when he was deploring the horrors of the War has vanished. Comments are more direct, less ironic: ‘tout le monde est ruiné.… Ah quel siècle!’ (D7842, 2 September 1758). ‘Quel triste siècle’ (D7846, 3 September 1758); ‘Le naufrage parait universel’ (D7848, 5 September 1758). To the theme of shipwreck is added the despairing note: ‘Une planche, vite … !’(D7839, 2 September 1758).16 It is the dark mood of the Lisbon storm, when the one selfless man in Candide, Jacques, is drowned, while the sailor who murdered him swims to safety (Chapter 5).
One general factor must also not be overlooked in this pessimism. Voltaire is disheartened by the decline of French prestige and influence in the world. Concern is often expressed about cultural and military affairs together, as in a letter to d’Argental in March where he bewails the fact that since the battle of Rossbach ‘everything has been in decline in our armies, as in the fine arts in Paris’ (D7676). The philosophe had long been persuaded that belles-lettres in France were degenerating and that the French were living on past credit. This kind of comment proliferates in 1758. Voltaire notes that every French play now is hissed in Europe (D7836). The observation about living off the glory of the previous century returns in a letter where the author links together a series of charges against the French: a shortage of talent in every field; a profu