Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Candide; Or All for the Best: A New Translation From the French
Who returned it to him, saying that he should have abstained from including in it so many indecencies, having no need to resort to such a means of obtaining readers. It must, however, be borne in mind that Voltaire is never coarse from a mere delight in dabbling in the unclean. When the work appeared, although the title-page declared that it was translated from the German of M. Le docteur Ralph there was no well kept secret as to its true authorship. Many other of Voltaire's friends were scandalised, and he disavowed the work in a letter purporting to be written by one Demad, brother of the translator indeed he is reported to have spoken of the book himself as a bad joke. Yet it remains to-day, more than a century after the close of his long life, his best remembered work; and, whether we agree with the Duchesse de la Valliere in deprecating the indecencies as unnecessary irrelevan cies, or whether we consider them as only marking strong counts in the indictment of optimism, we cannot ignore the fact that we have in it a veritable master piece, characterised throughout by searching wit.
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