Candide and Martin take a gondola on the Brenta to the palace of Signor Pococurante. The gardens have marble statues. The house is beautifully built. The master is sixty, very rich, and receives them with polite indifference that puts Candide out of countenance and suits Martin. Two pretty girls serve frothed chocolate. Candide commends their beauty. They are good enough creatures, says the Senator. He makes them lie with him sometimes, being tired of the ladies of the town, their jealousies, their sonnets, and their follies. After all, these two begin to weary him.
In the gallery Candide is surprised by pictures. The first two are Raphaels, bought at a great price out of vanity. They do not please him. The colours are too dark, the figures not rounded, the draperies unlike stuffs. He cares only for a picture when he thinks he sees nature itself, and there are none of that sort. A concert is delicious to Candide and noise to the Senator: music today is only the art of executing difficult things, and what is only difficult cannot please long. Opera is a monster. An eunuch quavering Caesar shocks him. In the library a magnificently bound Homer was once Pangloss's delight. It is not Pococurante's. The battles repeat, the gods do nothing decisive, Helen scarcely appears, Troy is besieged forever. Sincere learned men, he says, own that the poem makes them sleep, yet they keep it like a rusty medal. Virgil's second, fourth, and sixth books he grants; the rest is flat. Horace has a few useful maxims and much distasteful low quarrel. Fools admire everything in an author of reputation. He reads only to please himself. Cicero he never reads. Four-score volumes of the Academy of Sciences contain chimerical systems and not a single useful thing, not even how to make pins. Three thousand dramatic works yield not three dozen good ones. English books have the privilege of writing as one thinks, then passion and party spirit corrupt that liberty. Milton is a barbarian with compasses in heaven and a stomach-turning Sin and Death. Candide, who respects Homer and is fond of Milton, is grieved. Softly he calls Pococurante a superior man, a great genius. Nothing can please him.
In the garden Candide praises the beauties. The master knows of nothing in so bad a taste. After tomorrow he will have it planted with a nobler design. On the way out Candide tells Martin this must be the happiest of mortals, for he is above everything he possesses. Martin answers with Plato: those stomachs are not the best that reject all sorts of food. Is there not a pleasure, Candide asks, in pointing out faults where others see beauties? That is to say, says Martin, that there is some pleasure in having no pleasure. Well, well, Candide will be the only happy man when he sees Cunegonde. It is always well to hope, says Martin. The days and weeks pass. Cacambo does not come. Candide is so overwhelmed that he does not even reflect that Paquette and Friar Giroflée have not returned to thank him.
Coming Up in Chapter 26
One evening, as Candide and Martin go to supper with foreigners at their inn, a man as black as soot takes Candide by the arm and says he must come along. He turns and sees Cacambo.
