50 Fun Facts About Candide

Which legendary land does Candide stumble upon, a hidden kingdom with no prisons, lawsuits or monks?

El Dorado is the one happy society in the book, where children use gold and jewels as playthings. Candide still leaves after a month because he misses Cunégonde.

Which city is flattened by an earthquake just as Candide and Pangloss reach shore after a shipwreck?

Lisbon really was destroyed in 1755 by an earthquake, a tsunami and fires. The disaster convinced Voltaire that a world this cruel could not be the best one available.

In Candide, which item does Pangloss say noses were made to carry, proving everything has a purpose?

Spectacles, says Pangloss, are the reason noses exist, just as legs were plainly designed for stockings. Voltaire uses the backwards logic to mock thinkers who find a purpose in everything.

Long before Candide, Voltaire was twice locked up in which Paris fortress for offending the mighty?

The Bastille held him for eleven months over a satirical verse about the Regent, and again in 1726 after he challenged a nobleman to a duel. He took the name Voltaire after the first stay.

In Candide, a maimed slave says his lost hand and leg are the price of which luxury Europe enjoys?

Sugar cost him a hand to the cane mill and a leg for trying to run away. The sight makes Candide cry out that he must at last give up his tutor's cheerful philosophy.

The Old Woman in Candide reveals she was born the daughter of a princess and which kind of ruler?

A pope fathered her, the invented Urban X, so she is illegitimate by definition. A later note in Voltaire's name joked about the author's tact in choosing a number no real pontiff had used.

In 1929 US customs seized Candide as obscene on its way to a French class at which university?

Harvard received its copies that August, after the course had ended. The customs man explained that the book had been let through for years until one of his colleagues actually read it.

Candide ends with its hero cutting off Pangloss's final lecture and saying they must cultivate what?

Our garden is Candide's whole reply: stop theorising and get on with useful work. He takes the idea from an old Turkish farmer whose family lives contentedly off a small plot.

Which composer set Candide as a Broadway operetta that flopped but became a cult hit on record?

Leonard Bernstein's 1956 show closed after just 73 performances. Its overture has outlived the run, earning a lasting place in the orchestral repertoire.

What gets young Candide thrown out of the Baron's castle in the opening chapter of Voltaire's tale?

A stolen kiss with the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen earns Candide a kicking out of the door. He spends the rest of the story trying to find her again.

In which region is the Baron's castle where Candide grows up, taught that all is for the best?

Westphalia gives Voltaire his first joke: the Baron counts as one of its mightiest lords because his castle has a gate and windows.

What relation is Candide rumoured to be to the Baron whose castle he grows up in?

His nephew, the old servants suspect: the son of the Baron's sister and a neighbour she refused to marry because his coat of arms showed only seventy-one noble quarterings.

Which army's recruiters trick Candide into uniform, an army Voltaire used as a stand-in for Prussia?

The Bulgars buy Candide dinner, toast their king with him and then clap him in fetters as a recruit. Their enemies in the novel, the Abares, stand for the French.

Which disease has left Pangloss a beggar covered in sores when Candide finds him again in Holland?

Syphilis costs Pangloss an eye and an ear before he is cured. He proudly traces the infection back through a chambermaid, a friar, a countess and a page to one of Columbus's companions.

Jacques, the kind merchant who shelters Candide in Holland, belongs to which Christian sect?

Anabaptist Jacques, a man who had never been christened, is the one person in Holland who shows Candide any charity. A preacher fresh from a sermon on charity has just refused him bread.

Which punishment does the Inquisition give Pangloss in Candide, though he turns up alive much later?

Hanged because heavy rain made a fire impossible, Pangloss survives when the wet rope fails to tighten. He wakes up screaming as a surgeon who bought his body begins to dissect it.

Which ceremony is staged in Candide in the belief it will stop further earthquakes?

An auto-da-fé is what the University of Coimbra prescribes in the novel, ruling that burning a few people over a slow fire is a sure way to keep the earth from shaking.

In Candide, which body part does the Old Woman lose to starving soldiers who eat it during a siege?

A buttock was cut from every captive woman at Azov after a preacher persuaded the starving Janissaries not to kill them all at once. The Old Woman tells it to show her woes outdo Cunégonde's.

To which South American port do Candide, Cunégonde and the Old Woman sail after fleeing Portugal?

Buenos Aires is where a governor with five surnames takes a fancy to Cunégonde. Candide has to run again when officers arrive hunting the killer of the Grand Inquisitor.

Which quick-witted valet leads Candide through South America and talks captors out of eating them?

Cacambo, a quarter Spanish by birth, has been a choirboy, sacristan, sailor, monk, pedlar, soldier and lackey. His practical sense is the opposite of Pangloss's theorising.

Which South American land, run in Candide by priests with their own army, does the hero flee to?

Paraguay in the novel is a state where, as Candide's valet puts it, the fathers own everything and the people nothing. The commandant he meets there turns out to be a face from home.

In Candide, the Oreillons plan to cook the hero because his robe suggests he belongs to which order?

The Jesuits are so hated by the Oreillons that Candide is freed the moment the tribe learns he has just run one through. Their cry about eating one became a popular catchphrase.

Which animals does Candide shoot in South America, thinking he is saving two women from them?

Two monkeys fall to his double-barrelled Spanish gun, and the women weep over the bodies. His valet explains that the animals were probably their lovers.

Which animals carry the jewels Candide takes away from the hidden utopia he visits in South America?

Red sheep, a hundred of them and faster than fine horses, leave loaded with gold and gems. Swamps, deserts and precipices claim nearly all of them, and a ship's captain steals the last two.

In which Dutch colony does a swindling ship's captain rob Candide of a fortune and sail off without him?

Suriname is where the merchant Vanderdendur takes Candide's money and sails off without him. A local judge then fines Candide for complaining too loudly about the theft.

Which gloomy scholar joins Candide's journey after winning his contest for the unhappiest man?

Martin, robbed by his wife, beaten by his son and abandoned by his daughter, expects the worst of everyone. He spends the rest of the journey arguing against every hopeful thing Candide says.

What reason is given in Candide for England shooting one of its own admirals?

To encourage the others is the dry reply Candide receives at Portsmouth. Voltaire was thinking of Admiral John Byng, shot by firing squad in 1757 for failing to do his utmost against the French.

In which city does Candide dine with six strangers who all turn out to be dethroned kings?

Venice at Carnival hosts the strangest supper in the book: all six guests are real figures, deposed or would-be monarchs from Turkey and Russia to Poland and Corsica.

Which relative of Cunégonde does Candide run through with a sword, only to find him alive later?

Her brother, the young Baron, attacks Candide for daring to propose marrying her. Ransomed by Candide years later, he objects to the match all over again.

Near which great city do Candide and his companions finally settle on a small farm?

Constantinople is close enough for the household to sell its vegetables there. It is also where Cunégonde has ended up, washing dishes for an exiled prince.

What has become of Cunégonde by the time Candide finally tracks her down at the end of the tale?

She has grown ugly, sunburnt and wrinkled after years of drudgery. Candide no longer wishes to marry her but does it anyway, spurred on by the young Baron's refusal to allow it.

Which kind of holy man slams his door on Candide and Pangloss when asked why humans must suffer?

A dervish, reputed the best philosopher in Turkey, compares mankind to mice aboard a ship whose owner never asks whether they are comfortable. His only advice to the visitors is to keep quiet.

The old Turk in Candide says work keeps away three great evils: vice, poverty and which other?

Boredom comes first in his list. The Turk neither knows nor cares which officials were strangled in the capital that week; he farms twenty acres with his children and sells the fruit.

Which rich senator in Candide owns the great works of art and literature and sneers at every one?

Pococurante, whose name is built from Italian words for caring little, dismisses Homer, Virgil, Milton and his own Raphaels. Candide takes this for greatness; his companion suspects the man enjoys nothing.

Pangloss tells Candide his disease is a fair price because the same voyages gave Europe which treat?

Chocolate and the dye cochineal are his proof that the infection was a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds. It is Voltaire's sharpest parody of arguing that every evil serves a greater good.

Which philosopher's claim that this is the best of all possible worlds does Candide set out to mock?

Leibniz reasoned that God, choosing among every world He could make, must have created the most perfect one, evils and all. Pangloss repeats the idea through war, shipwreck and slavery without ever revising it.

To hide its author, Candide's title page claimed the tale was translated from which language?

German was the supposed original, credited to an invented Doctor Ralph. Voltaire kept up the pretence for years and did not openly admit the book was his until 1768.

Which war, raging while Voltaire wrote Candide, lies behind the book's early battle scenes?

The Seven Years' War pitted Prussia against France, and Voltaire shows both kings ordering hymns of thanks for the same slaughter. Candide deserts by picking his way over heaps of dead and dying.

The real 1755 earthquake Voltaire put into Candide struck on the morning of which Christian feast?

All Saints' Day candles, burning in homes and churches across the city, were knocked over by the shocks and started a firestorm. Thinkers struggled to square such horror with a kindly providence.

Which earlier satire of a naive voyager in remote nations is a close literary cousin of Candide?

Gulliver's Travels came out in 1726, the year Voltaire arrived in England, and he probably drew on it. Both heroes start out trusting everyone and are hardened by one misfortune after another.

Which city's council banned Candide within weeks, though Voltaire had a home just outside it?

Geneva's council condemned the book within weeks of its appearance in January 1759. It still sold an estimated twenty to thirty thousand copies before the year was out.

Which literary form does Candide borrow, hurling its hero through one misadventure after another?

Picaresque novels follow a drifting rogue of low birth from scrape to scrape. Voltaire keeps the breathless episodes but makes his wanderer an innocent instead of a rascal.

Which earlier Voltaire tale of a wise man in ancient Babylon shares its genre with Candide?

Zadig, published in 1747, follows a philosopher through ancient Babylonia. Along with Candide it defined the conte philosophique, the short philosophical tale Voltaire made his own.

Voltaire, author of Candide, was the pen name taken after a spell in prison by which French writer?

François-Marie Arouet took the name Voltaire in 1718 and went on to use at least 178 pen names. Candide itself first appeared under yet another alias.

The name Candide comes from a Latin word for honesty and innocence that first meant which colour?

White is the root sense of the Latin candidum, from a verb meaning to shine; frank and sincere came later. Voltaire says the youth was given the name for his simplicity of spirit.

Voltaire built the name Pangloss in Candide from two Greek words that together mean what?

All tongue is the literal sense, from pan and glossa, fitting a man who never stops explaining. English later made Panglossian a word for the blindly cheerful, first recorded in 1831.

Which modern artist said he discovered his own style while reading Candide and later illustrated it?

Paul Klee's drawings for the book were published in a 1920 edition. Voltaire would have disapproved: he called illustrations useless baubles that Cicero and Virgil never needed.

In which Paris monument were the remains of Candide's author enshrined during the Revolution?

The Panthéon received Voltaire in 1791, thirteen years after his death, because the National Assembly saw him as a forerunner of the Revolution. Rousseau's remains were placed nearby three years later.

Candide's author Voltaire stood with Diderot at the head of which eighteenth-century movement?

The Enlightenment prized reason and free speech over inherited authority. Voltaire spent his life attacking the Catholic Church and defending freedom of religion, and Candide is that campaign at its funniest.

How does the generous merchant Jacques die in Candide, moments after rescuing a brutal sailor?

He drowns within sight of the Portuguese coast while the sailor he saved looks on without lifting a finger. Pangloss stops Candide diving in, explaining that the bay was made expressly for this.