They sight the French coast, and Candide asks whether Martin has been in the country. Martin sorts the provinces as if they were already finished: fools in one, too much cunning in another, weakness here, affected wit there. In all of them, he says, the principal occupation is love, the next slander, and the third talking nonsense. Paris holds every kind at once. It is a chaos where everybody seeks pleasure and scarcely anyone finds it. Pickpockets at the fair of St. Germain took what he had. He was taken for a robber, locked up for eight days, then corrected proofs so he could walk back to Holland. He knew the scribbling rabble, the party rabble, and the fanatic rabble. It is said there are polite people in that city, and he wishes to believe it.
Candide has no curiosity left for France. After a month in El Dorado he wants only Cunegonde, waiting in Venice, and they will pass through on the way to Italy. Martin agrees at once. Venice, he has heard, receives strangers well if they have a good deal of money. He has none. Candide has it, so he will follow him all over the world. Candide then asks whether the earth was originally a sea, as a large book belonging to the captain asserts. Martin believes not a word of it, nor of the ravings published lately. For what end, then, was this world formed? To plague us to death, says Martin. The Oreillon girls and the monkeys do not surprise him. He has seen so many extraordinary things that he has ceased to be surprised.
Candide still wants a difference. Have men always massacred one another, and always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, and the rest of the list? Martin asks whether hawks have always eaten pigeons when they found them. Yes, without doubt. Well then, if hawks have kept the same character, why imagine that men have changed theirs? Candide begins on free will. They are still reasoning when they reach Bordeaux.
