‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk. I never bother with what is going on in Constantinople I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold there.’ Having said these words, he invited the strangers into his house his two sons and two daughters presented them with several sorts of sherbet, which they had made themselves, with kaimak enriched with the candied-peel of citrons, with oranges, lemons, pine-apples, pistachio-nuts, and Mocha coffee… – after which the two daughters of the honest Muslim perfumed the strangers’ beards. I have no idea what you’re talking about my general view is that people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they deserve to. ‘I don’t know,’ answered the worthy man, ‘and I have never known the name of any Mufti, nor of any Vizier. Pangloss, who was as inquisitive as he was argumentative, asked the old man what the name of the strangled Mufti was. But near their farm, Candide, together with his friends Martin and Pangloss, pass an old man who is peacefully and indifferently sitting under an orange bower next to his house:
One day they learn of trouble at the Ottoman court: two Viziers and the Mufti have been strangled and several of their associates impaled. But they have – more or less – survived and, in the final pages, find themselves in Turkey – a country Voltaire especially admired – living in a small farm in a suburb of Istanbul. Candide and his companions have travelled the world and suffered immensely: they have known persecution, shipwrecks, rapes, earthquakes, smallpox, starvation and torture. The book ends on a memorably tender and stoic note the tone is elegiac we encounter one of the finest expressions of the melancholic viewpoint ever written. Nevertheless, Voltaire’s novel is not simply a tragic tale nor is his own philosophy mordantly nihilistic. Hope was a disease and it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try to cure us of it. Of all this his readers were to be left in no doubt. Of course love was an illusion power a chimera, humans irredeemably wicked, and the future absurd.
Of course philosophy would not be able to explain away the problem of evil it would only show up our vanity. Of course science wasn’t going to improve the world it would merely give new power to tyrants. If there was one central target that its author wanted satirically to destroy, it was the hope of his age, a hope that centered around science, love, technical progress and reason. It is crucial to note the subtitle of 18th century Europe’s most famous novel, written in three inspired days in 1759: ‘Candide – or Optimism’.
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