The Survivors Tell Their Tales — Candide

Candide asks the Baron's pardon once more for having run him through the body. Say no more about it, the Baron answers. He was a little too hasty. After the college surgeon cured the wound, Spanish troops seized him and jailed him at Buenos Ayres as his sister was leaving. He asked to return to Rome, was made chaplain to the French Ambassador at Constantinople, and within eight days met a handsome young Ichoglan. The weather was warm. They bathed. He did not know it was a capital crime for a Christian to be found naked with a young Mussulman. A cadi ordered a hundred blows on the soles of the feet and condemned him to the galleys. He does not think there ever was a greater act of injustice. He would like to know how his sister came to be scullion to a Transylvanian prince.

Candide turns to Pangloss. How can he behold him again? It is true he was hanged. He should have been burnt, but the rain was so hard they despaired of lighting the fire, so they hanged him because they could do no better. A surgeon bought the body and began a crucial incision from navel to clavicle. The executioner was a sub-deacon, marvellous at burning, unaccustomed to hanging. The cord was wet, badly tied. Pangloss still drew breath. The incision made him scream. The surgeon took him for the devil, fled, and fell down the stairs. The wife saw the body, fled, and tumbled over her husband. She wanted a priest to exorcise a heretic. Pangloss cried for mercy. The barber sewed him, the wife nursed him, and in fifteen days he was on his legs. He served a penniless knight of Malta, then a Venetian merchant to Constantinople. In a mosque an old Iman and a pretty devotee were at their paternosters, her bosom uncovered, a bouquet of tulips and roses between her breasts. She dropped it. He picked it up and was so long presenting it that the Iman called for help. A hundred lashes and the galleys followed. He was chained to the same bench as the Baron. Four young men from Marseilles, five Neapolitan priests, and two monks from Corfu told similar daily adventures. The Baron maintained he had suffered greater injustice. Pangloss insisted that replacing a bouquet was more innocent than bathing with an Ichoglan. They disputed until the concatenation of universal events brought Candide, and the bull's pizzle, and the ransom.

Well, says Candide, when you had been hanged, dissected, whipped, and were tugging at the oar, did you always think that everything happens for the best? I am still of my first opinion, answers Pangloss, for I am a philosopher and I cannot retract, especially as Leibniz could never be wrong, and besides, the pre-established harmony is the finest thing in the world, and so is his plenum and materia subtilis.