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"The custom," said the great officer, "is to embrace the King, and to kiss him on each cheek." Candide and Cacambo threw themselves round his Majesty's neck. He received them with all the goodness imaginable, and politely invited them to supper.
Cherry recognized the voice of Candide, and in his rage would have sprung upon her and devoured her; but he saw nothing and the same voice said behind him: "Cease thy feeble fury, and learn to conquer thy pride by being in submission to thine own subjects."
I am greatly and agreeably struck by the animation and showiness of Madrid after Lisbon, which is one of the dullest towns I ever saw. Life at Lisbon is en robe de chambre; here it is all en toilette. Pretty faces seem to be as plentiful here as gold nuggets in the streets of Eldorado, when Candide saw them.
"He is a scholar," said the lady, "who does not play, whom the Abbé sometimes brings to supper; he is perfectly at home among tragedies and books, and he has written a tragedy which was hissed, and a book of which nothing has ever been seen outside his bookseller's shop excepting the copy which he dedicated to me." "The great man!" said Candide. "He is another Pangloss!"
Half dead of that inconceivable anguish which the rolling of a ship produces, one-half of the passengers were not even sensible of the danger. The other half shrieked and prayed. The sheets were rent, the masts broken, the vessel gaped. Work who would, no one heard, no one commanded. The Anabaptist being upon deck bore a hand; when a brutish sailor struck him roughly and laid him sprawling; but with the violence of the blow he himself tumbled head foremost overboard, and stuck upon a piece of the broken mast. Honest James ran to his assistance, hauled him up, and from the effort he made was precipitated into the sea in sight of the sailor, who left him to perish, without deigning to look at him. Candide drew near and saw his benefactor, who rose above the water one moment and was then swallowed up for ever. He was just going to jump after him, but was prevented by the philosopher Pangloss, who demonstrated to him that the Bay of Lisbon had been made on purpose for the Anabaptist to be drowned. While he was proving this
But others, despairing of any rational solution, cut the Gordian knot and declare that "the kindest thing to think about Francis is that he was crazy." Roman Catholics naturally reject all explanations that exclude the supernatural, for, as Father Candide Chalippe affirms: "Catholics ought to be cautious in adopting anything coming from heretics; their opinions are almost always contagious."
Pangloss made answer in these terms: "Oh, my dear Candide, you remember Paquette, that pretty wench who waited on our noble Baroness; in her arms I tasted the delights of paradise, which produced in me those hell torments with which you see me devoured; she was infected with them, she is perhaps dead of them.
And then the sounds of beauty flowed and trembled, and seemed, for a little space, to triumph over the pains of living and the hard hearts of men; and the royal master poured out his skill in some long and elaborate cadenza, and the adagio came, the marvellous adagio, and the conqueror of Rossbach drew tears from the author of Candide.
Candide, almost prostrating himself before him, cried: "Master Pangloss has well said that all is for the best in this world, for I am infinitely more touched by your extreme generosity than with the inhumanity of that gentleman in the black coat and his lady."
Candide, all stupefied, could not yet very well realise how he was a hero. He resolved one fine day in spring to go for a walk, marching straight before him, believing that it was a privilege of the human as well as of the animal species to make use of their legs as they pleased.
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