75 pages • 2 hours read
Candide
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Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
After the earthquake, the “sages of that country” (15), decided to hold an auto-da-fé, believing that burning heretics at the stake will ward off further earthquakes. Pangloss and Candide are tied up and held in a dungeon for eight days before being dressed in a san-benito robes decorated with flames and devils. They are brought to the auto-da-fé, where Candide is flogged while a Biscayan convicted of “marrying his fellow godparent” (15) and two Portuguese accused of “throwing away the bacon garnish while eating a chicken” (15-16) are burned to death. Pangloss is hanged, and there is another earthquake that same day. Candide is distraught over Pangloss’ hanging and questions his teacher’s philosophy, asking, “if this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?” (16). He thinks about the senseless loss of his teacher, the Anabaptist, and Cunégonde. After being “successively preached at, flogged, absolved and blessed” (16) he turns to go but an old woman approaches him and invites him to “take heart” (16) and follow her.
Chapter 7 Summary
Candide follows the woman to her home where she feeds and heals him. Day after day she rubs ointment into his skin and feeds him, and Candide is mystified by her kindness. Eventually she leads him into the country to an isolated house surrounded by gardens and canals, knocks on a door, and leads him up a secret staircase to a “small gilt room,” (17) leaving him there. The old woman returns with a trembling, veiled woman, and invites Candide to remove the veil. He discovers it is Cunégonde and faints, while the latter collapses on the sofa. The old woman leaves them alone after they are revived and Candide learns that Cunégonde was indeed raped and disemboweled, but “these things are not always fatal” (18). She says both her parents and brother were killed, and agrees to tell him her story, but only after he tells of his journey up until that point. Candide recounts his own tale “with the most artless simplicity” (18) and Cunégonde cries at the deaths of the Anabaptist and Pangloss. Candide then listens attentively as she tells her story.
Chapter 8 Summary
In Cunégonde’s story, she is asleep in her bed when their castle is attacked by Bulgars. They kill both her parents, and when she faints, she is raped by a Bulgar soldier. As she struggles against him, he stabs her in the left side. A captain enters the room, and when the soldier ignores him to continue raping Cunégonde, the captain kills the soldier because of his insolence. The Bulgar captain takes Cunégonde as a prisoner of war; he is attracted to her, and he keeps her for three months until he loses all his money and his interest in her. He sells her to a Jewish man named Don Issacar, who she resists despite his attraction to her. She is currently in his country house. The Grand Inquisitor noticed her at Mass and proposes that Don Issacar hand her over to him. When Don Issacar refuses, the Grand Inquisitor threatens him with an auto-da-fé, so they decide to share her company: Don Issacar has her on Mondays, Wednesdays, and the Sabbath, the Grand Inquisitor the rest of the week. She has resisted them both up until now.
Cunégonde then relates that she was invited to an auto-da-fé at which she was shocked to recognize both Candide and Pangloss. She fainted at Pangloss’ hanging and could barely stop herself from screaming at Candide’s flogging. She could not understand how it is possible they could both be in Lisbon under such terrible circumstances, and questions Pangloss’ wisdom that all is for the best. Overcome with the memories of her recent experiences and losses, she recounts that she ordered the old woman to take care of Candide and bring him to her. Cunégonde concludes her story and they dine, after which they are back on the couch when Don Issacar comes home.
Chapter 9 Summary
Don Issacar is enraged to find Cunégonde with Candide, and he attacks Candide with a dagger. Candide slays the man with a sword, and he falls “stone dead at the feet of the lovely Cunégonde” (22), who is distressed. They ask the old woman what to do, who “was all prudence” (22), but before she can answer, the Inquisitor arrives, as it is past midnight on Sunday and his turn with Cunégonde. Candide quickly reasons with himself that he must kill the Inquisitor or he will surely be burned at the stake because the man “has already had [him] mercilessly whipped; he is now [his] rival” (22), and Candide has already killed a man. He runs the Inquisitor through with his sword, killing him. Cunégonde is shocked at the man Candide has become, killing two men successively, and Candide explains “when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there’s no knowing what you may do” (22).
The old woman intervenes to say they should flee into the night on horseback to Cadiz. Candide saddles the horses while Cunégonde collects her gold and jewels, and they leave. The dead men are discovered later, and the Inquisitor is buried in a beautiful church, while Don Issacar is “thrown on to the town refuse heap” (23). Meanwhile, the trio stop at an inn in Avacena.
Chapter 10 Summary
Cunégonde is distraught because someone has stolen her gold and jewels. The old woman suspects it was a Franciscan who slept in the same room as them at a different inn. Using Pangloss’ reasoning that everyone “has an equal right” (23) to the things of this world, Candide complains that the Franciscan should have at least left them a share of the jewels. The old woman says they can sell one horse and that she can ride with Cunégonde “even though [she has] only one buttock for a seat” (23). They sell the horse to a Benedictine and continue on to Cadiz, where a fleet of ships are preparing to leave for Paraguay. On the ships are soldiers ready to confront “the reverend Jesuit fathers of Paraguay” (24) who have stirred up trouble against the crown. After Candide demonstrates his skill as a soldier, he is made captain of a company of infantry.
The three of them discussed Pangloss’ philosophy as they travel to the Americas. Candide is confident they are approaching a better world, but Cunégonde is reeling from her recent experiences, and her heart “is almost sealed against hope” (24). The old woman scolds them for complaining, saying her experience in life has been much worse. Cunégonde is skeptical the old woman’s experience could be worse than hers, but the woman begins her story.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
Candide is temporarily separated from his teacher Pangloss but reunited with his love, Cunégonde, as they flee to the Americas. An idealized version of Cunégonde becomes compromised by her lived reality, where she goes from an innocent girl raised in a noble household, to one who quickly finds herself an object of exchange. While the idealized version of Cunégonde will persist in Candide’s mind for some time, she has now experienced much of the harsh, real world: She has been stabbed, violently raped and traded between men, and at one point reduced in status to a maid and cook for a captain who quickly bores of her. She now finds herself shared between two men she abhors, but she has the company of the old woman to assist her when she rediscovers Candide.
From the start, Cunégonde’s journey is a challenge to Pangloss’ philosophy of the best possible world. A hint of this is found at the beginning of Chapter 8, where she recalls the invasion, sarcastically saying, “when it pleased heaven to send the Bulgars to our beautiful castle” (19). For Voltaire, the notion that this turn of events would please a benevolent God is absurd; Cunégonde’s mother is cut to pieces, her father and brother are left to die with their throats cut, and their castle is destroyed. As she finishes her tale, her eyes are wide open, and she has a clearer vision of Pangloss’ faults than Candide, bitterly saying “Pangloss deceived me cruelly, after all, when he told me that all is for the best in this world” (21).
On reuniting with Cunégonde, Candide loses his innocence. When faced with losing her again, he reacts quickly when the men return, killing both Don Issacar and the Inquisitor “in the space of two minutes” (22), as Cunégonde remarks, wondering what has gotten into him. Candide’s excuse is, “[W]hen you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there’s no knowing what you may do” (22). Candide, who was “born so gentle” (22) is not the innocent child he still seems to think he is, and his actions set them on a path of flight from the continent. Voltaire shows what extreme cruelty can do to even the most “innocent” of souls. For now, there will be no consequences: Despite Candide’s rash behavior, the pragmatic old woman, who the reader learns later has seen her fair share of trouble, has an escape plan in mind and they leave before the bodies are found.
The church’s authority remains a constant target for Voltaire. He criticizes the severity of the Spanish Inquisition in Chapter 6, where guilt is established, and corporeal punishment is doled out through conjecture and superstition. An example of this is the two Portuguese men accused of false conversion. The Spanish Inquisition was on the lookout for Jewish or Muslim people who were essentially forcibly converted to Christianity but who secretly kept their faith, as evidenced by the continued refusal to eat pork. These men are “sacrificed” to prevent further earthquakes. Voltaire mocks this hypocrisy, where agents of the Inquisition participate in the superstitious human sacrifice of criminals, to appease a vengeful god, and the Grand Inquisitor is trying his best to break his vows of chastity by sharing Cunégonde with a Jewish merchant. While human sacrifice would have been seen as savage by European culture in the 18th century, the Inquisitors nonetheless justify it in their desire to consolidate power, just as the Inquisitor justifies his own desire for Cunégonde.
This hypocrisy becomes even more evident in Chapter 10 when they are robbed of their pistoles and diamonds by a Franciscan friar who lodges at the same inn. Franciscans in particular are known to have taken a vow of poverty, so the fact that this particular friar has stolen their entire purse of jewels is particularly damning. Conversely, they sell their horse “at a reduced price” (24) to a Benedictine prior, when Benedictines were known for being wealthy. In each case, the men of the church do not practice what they preach. As they leave for the New World, where they hope to finally encounter the best of all possible worlds, they travel with troops ready to confront the Jesuits of Paraguay, who are trying to wrest power from the King of Spain by inciting local revolts. As such, Voltaire criticizes three major orders of the Catholic Church for duplicity, whether through theft, swindling, philandering, or political intrigue. For the moment, the travelers are moving beyond these “old world” structures and into something new, but they cannot escape the residual corruption of European society, which has almost entirely infiltrated South America.
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