Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories [Paperback]

France’s most distinguished man of letters

This essential collection from the genius Voltaire includes his masterpiece and best-known work Candide, as well as his novel Zadig and fourteen short stories: “Micromegas,” “The World as It Is,” “Memnon,” “Bababec and the Fakirs,” “History of Scarmentado’s Travels,” “Plato’s Dream,” “Account of the Sickness, Confession, Death, and Apparition of the Jesuit Berthier,” “Story of a Good Brahman,” “Jeannot and Colin,” “An Indian Adventure,” “Ingenuous,” “The One-Eyed Porter,” “Memory’s Adventure,” “Count Chesterfield’s Ears,” and “Chaplain Goudman.”

 

François-Marie Arouet, writing under the pseudonym Voltaire, was born in 1694 into a Parisian bourgeois family. Educated by Jesuits, he was an excellent pupil but one quickly enraged by dogma. An early rift with his father—who wished him to study law—led to his choice of letters as a career. Insinuating himself into court circles, he became notorious for lampoons on leading notables and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille.

By his mid-thirties his literary activities precipitated a four-year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later in France, of Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733)—an attack on French Church and State—forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. In this, his most prolific pl7