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"Ah! captain," said Candide, "what ransom will you take for Monsieur de Thunder-ten-Tronckh, one of the first barons of the empire, and for Monsieur Pangloss, the profoundest metaphysician in Germany?"
For my part I shall give it to nobody, I am dying." "Oh, Pangloss!" cried Candide, "what a strange genealogy! Is not the Devil the original stock of it?"
Pangloss owned that he had always suffered horribly, but as he had once asserted that everything went wonderfully well, he asserted it still, though he no longer believed it. What helped to confirm Martin in his detestable principles, to stagger Candide more than ever, and to puzzle Pangloss, was that one day they saw Paquette and Friar Giroflée land at the farm in extreme misery.
And not being life's aim, life often disregards the people who pursue it for its own sake. I am not, like Dr. Pangloss, a professional philosopher, and what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical nor mystic.
Whether I had been intemperate in food or libation I know not, but I was attacked with the Walcheren fever, and was sent home in a line-of-battle ship; and, perhaps, as Pangloss says, it was all for the best; for I knew I could not have left off my inveterate habits, and it would have been very inconvenient to me, and distressing to my friends, to have ended my brilliant career, and stopped these memoirs, at the beginning of the second and most interesting volume, by hanging the Author up, like a scarecrow, under the superintendence of the rascally provost-marshal, merely for catering on the land of a Walcheren farmer.
"Your Excellency will excuse me," said Pangloss; "liberty is consistent with absolute necessity, for it was necessary we should be free; for, in short, the determinate will " Pangloss was in the middle of his sentence, when the Familiar beckoned to his footman, who gave him a glass of wine from Porto or Opporto.
As Old Phil Stapleton he is the patriarch of the village and the incarnation of content. As Asa Trenchard he is the diamond in the rough, combining shrewdness with simplicity, and elevating instead of degrading the Yankee character. As Dr. Ollapod, and Dr. Pangloss, and Tobias Shortcut, he has won laurels that would make him a comedian of the first rank. His Bob Acres is a picture.
As soon as Pangloss had refreshed himself a little: "Well," said Candide, "Cunegonde?" "She is dead," replied the other. Candide fainted at this word; his friend recalled his senses with a little bad vinegar which he found by chance in the stable. Candide reopened his eyes. "Cunegonde is dead! Ah, best of worlds, where art thou? But of what illness did she die?
I take any part you chuse to give me, so as it be comic. Let it but be comic, I condition for nothing more." For about the fifth time he then proposed the Heir at Law, doubting only whether to prefer Lord Duberley or Dr. Pangloss for himself; and very earnestly, but very unsuccessfully, trying to persuade the others that there were some fine tragic parts in the rest of the dramatis personae.
While Candide, the Baron, Pangloss, Martin, and Cacambo were relating their several adventures, were reasoning on the contingent or non-contingent events of the universe, disputing on effects and causes, on moral and physical evil, on liberty and necessity, and on the consolations a slave may feel even on a Turkish galley, they arrived at the house of the Transylvanian prince on the banks of the Propontis.
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