The Portable Voltaire

Front Cover
Penguin, Jul 28, 1977 - Fiction - 576 pages
Includes Part One of Candide; three stories; selections from The Philosophical Dictionary, The Lisbon Earthquake, and other works; and thirty-five letters.
 

Contents

Title Page
1713
Selections
Miscellany
How Candide Met His Old Master in Philosophy Doctor
The Old Womans Story
How Candide and Cacambo Were Received by the jesuits
What Happened to Them at Surinam and How Candide Made
Candide and Martin Reach the Coast of England and What
DISPUTES AND AUDIENCES
THE SUPPER
THE DANCE
THE TOURNAMENTS
Conversation of the Inhabitant of Sirius with the Inhabitant
Conversation with the
Miscellaneous Letters
Selections from The English Letters The English Parliament

Candides Voyage to Constantinople
THE NOSE
Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations Recapitulation
Copyright

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About the author (1977)

François-Marie Arouet, writing under the pseudonym Voltaire, was born in 1694 into a Parisian bourgeois family. Educated by Jesuits, he was an excellent pupil but one quickly enraged by dogma. An early rift with his father—who wished him to study law—led to his choice of letters as a career. Insinuating himself into court circles, he became notorious for lampoons on leading notables and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille.

By his mid-thirties his literary activities precipitated a four-year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later in France, of Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733)—an attack on French Church and State—forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. In this, his most prolific period, he wrote such satirical tales as “Zadig” (1747) and “Candide” (1759). His old age at Ferney, outside Geneva, was made bright by his adopted daughter, “Belle et Bonne,” and marked by his intercessions in behalf of victims of political injustice. Sharp-witted and lean in his white wig, impatient with all appropriate rituals, he died in Paris in 1778—the foremost French author of his day.

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