WHAT BEFELL CANDIDE, CUNEGONDE, PANGLOSS,
MARTIN, ETC.
Pardon", said Candide to the Baron; "once more let me entreat your
pardon, Reverend Father, for running you through the body."
"Say no more about it", replied the Baron. "I was a little too hasty I must
own; but as you seem to be desirous to know by what accident I came to be
a slave on board the galley where you saw me, I will inform you. After I had
been cured of the wound you gave me, by the College apothecary, I was
attacked and carried off by a party of Spanish troops, who clapped me in
prison in Buenos Ayres, at the very time my sister was setting out from
there. I asked leave to return to Rome, to the general of my Order, who
appointed me chaplain to the French Ambassador at Constantinople. I had
not been a week in my new office, when I happened to meet one evening a
young Icoglan, extremely handsome and well-made. The weather was very
hot; the young man had an inclination to bathe. I took the opportunity to
bathe likewise. I did not know it was a crime for a Christian to be found
naked in company with a young Turk. A cadi ordered me to receive a
hundred blows on the soles of my feet, and sent me to the galleys. I do not
believe that there was ever an act of more flagrant injustice. But I would fain
know how my sister came to be a scullion to a Transylvanian prince, who
has taken refuge among the Turks?"
"But how happens it that I behold you again, my dear Pangloss?" said
Candide.
"It is true", answered Pangloss, "you saw me hanged, though I ought
properly to have been burned; but you may remember, that it rained
extremely hard when they were going to roast me. The storm was so violent
that they found it impossible to light the fire; so they hanged me because
they could do no better. A surgeon purchased my body, carried it home,
and prepared to dissect me. He began by making a crucial incision from my
navel to the clavicle. It is impossible for anyone to have been more lamely
hanged than I had been. The executioner was a subdeacon, and knew how
to burn people very well, but as for hanging, he was a novice at it, being
quite out of practice; the cord being wet, and not slipping properly, the
noose did not join. In short, I still continued to breathe; the crucial incision
made me scream to such a degree, that my surgeon fell flat upon his back;
and imagining it was the Devil he was dissecting, ran away, and in his fright
tumbled down stairs. His wife hearing the noise, flew from the next room,
and seeing me stretched upon the table with my crucial incision, was still
more terrified than her husband, and fell upon him. When they had a little
recovered themselves, I heard her say to her husband, 'My dear, how could
you think of dissecting a heretic? Don't you know that the Devil is always in
them? I'll run directly to a priest to come and drive the evil spirit out.' I
trembled from head to foot at hearing her talk in this manner, and exerted
what little strength I had left to cry out, 'Have mercy on me!' At length the
Portuguese barber took courage, sewed up my wound, and his wife nursed
me; and I was upon my legs in a fortnight's time. The barber got me a place
to be lackey to a Knight of Malta, who was going to Venice; but finding my
master had no money to pay me my wages, I entered into the service of a
Venetian merchant and went with him to Constantinople.
"One day I happened to enter a mosque, where I saw no one but an old
man and a very pretty young female devotee, who was telling her beads; her
neck was quite bare, and in her bosom she had a beautiful nosegay of
tulips, roses, anemones, ranunculuses, hyacinths, and auriculas; she let fall
her nosegay. I ran immediately to take it up, and presented it to her with a
most respectful bow. I was so long in delivering it that the man began to be
angry; and, perceiving I was a Christian, he cried out for help; they carried
me before the cadi, who ordered me to receive one hundred bastinadoes,
and sent me to the galleys. I was chained in the very galley and to the very
same bench with the Baron. On board this galley there were four young
men belonging to Marseilles, five Neapolitan priests, and two monks of
Corfu, who told us that the like adventures happened every day. The Baron
pretended that he had been worse used than myself; and I insisted that
there was far less harm in taking up a nosegay, and putting it into a
woman's bosom, than to be found stark naked with a young Icoglan. We
were continually whipped, and received twenty lashes a day with a heavy
thong, when the concatenation of sublunary events brought you on board
our galley to ransom us from slavery."
"Well, my dear Pangloss", said Candide to him, "when You were hanged,
dissected, whipped, and tugging at the oar, did you continue to think that
everything in this world happens for the best?"
"I have always abided by my first opinion", answered Pangloss; "for, after
all, I am a philosopher, and it would not become me to retract my
sentiments; especially as Leibnitz could not be in the wrong: and that
preestablished harmony is the finest thing in the world, as well as a plenum
and the materia subtilis."