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Updated: May 12, 2025
"Yes," answered Pococurante, "it is noble to write as one thinks; this is the privilege of humanity. In all our Italy we write only what we do not think; those who inhabit the country of the Cæsars and the Antoninuses dare not acquire a single idea without the permission of a Dominican friar.
If he has squandered the physical resources of his neighborhood, cutting the forests recklessly, exhausting the soil, surrendering water power and minerals into a few far-clutching fingers, he has done it because he expects, like Voltaire's Signor Pococurante, "to have a new garden tomorrow, built on a nobler plan."
'Oui, repondit Pococurante, il est beau d'ecrire ce qu 'on pense; c'est le privilege de l'homme. This stood by way of motto on the title-page, and Godwin felt his nerves thrill in sympathetic response. What a fine fellow he must be to have for a friend! Now a man like this surely had companionship enough and of the kind he wished?
The public 'the stupid and ignorant pig of a public, as 'Pococurante' called it years ago is always being abused, and yet it is only the public which, in the end, can tell us if we have done well or ill. We have all to consent to be measured by it, and, in the long run, it estimates our stature with a perfect accuracy.
"Oh! what a superior man," said Candide below his breath. "What a great genius is this Pococurante! Nothing can please him." After their survey of the library they went down into the garden, where Candide praised its several beauties. "I know of nothing in so bad a taste," said the master. "All you see here is merely trifling. After to-morrow I will have it planted with a nobler design."
"There might be," said Pococurante, "if only one of those rakers of rubbish had shown how to make pins; but in all these volumes there is nothing but chimerical systems, and not a single useful thing." "And what dramatic works I see here," said Candide, "in Italian, Spanish, and French." "Yes," replied the Senator, "there are three thousand, and not three dozen of them good for anything.
Archibald, though a follower of the court, and a pococurante by profession, was confused, if not affected; the dairy-maid blubbered; and Jeanie felt the tears rise spontaneously to her eyes. Even the nurse, accustomed to all modes in which the spirit can pass, seemed considerably moved.
are I suppose peculiar to itself, and best described by Monsieur de Voltaire, whose Pococurante the Venetian senator in Candide that possesses all delights in his villa upon the banks of the Brenta, is a very lively portrait, and would be natural too; but that Voltaire, as a Frenchman, could not forbear making his character speak in a very unItalian manner, boasting of his felicity in a style they never use, for they are really no puffers, no vaunters of that which they possess; make no disgraceful comparisons between their own rarities and the want of them in other countries, nor offend you as the French do, with false pity and hateful consolations.
On the side of his intellect he was a mere Pococurante, far too apathetic about public affairs, far too sceptical as to the good or evil tendency of any form of polity. His passions, on the contrary, were violent even to slaying against all who leaned to Whiggish principles.
"May I presume to ask you, sir," said Candide, "whether you do not receive a great deal of pleasure from reading Horace?" "There are maxims in this writer," answered Pococurante, "from which a man of the world may reap great benefit, and being written in energetic verse they are more easily impressed upon the memory.
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