Chapter 26 — six dethroned kings

One evening at the inn, just as Candide and Martin sit down with foreign visitors for supper, a man whose complexion is as black as soot comes up behind Candide and tells him to be ready to leave with them. Candide turns. It is Cacambo. Where is Cunégonde? Constantinople. Cacambo is a slave; his master is waiting; he must wait at table; sit down, eat, and be ready. Voltaire stages the rest of the chapter as a slow comic reveal.

Cacambo waits on one of the foreigners. Toward the end of the meal he draws near his master and whispers: "Sire, Your Majesty may leave whenever you please. The vessel is ready." The company stares; another servant approaches another master with a similar speech. A third valet does the same to a third foreigner. A fourth, the same. The fifth, the same. The sixth speaks differently: "Faith, Sire, they will give credit no longer. So I'll look out for myself. Farewell." All six servants are now gone. Candide breaks the silence: gentlemen, this is a very good joke — but why are you all kings?

Cacambo's master answers gravely, in Italian: I am Achmet III, dethroned by my nephew. The next: I am Ivan, dethroned in my cradle, raised in prison. The next: I am Charles Edward — the Young Pretender — eight hundred of my followers hanged, drawn, and quartered. The fourth: King of Poland, dispossessed by war (this is Augustus III). The fifth: also King of Poland, dethroned twice (this is Stanislas Leszczyński). The sixth: Theodore, elected King of Corsica, with the title of Majesty and now hardly treated as a gentleman; I have seen myself on a throne and on straw in a common jail in London. The other five give twenty sequins each to Theodore. Candide gives him a diamond worth two thousand sequins. The five whisper: who can this commoner be, who is able to give a hundred times more than any of us? Just as they are rising, four Serene Highnesses arrive — also stripped of their territories. Candide pays them no attention. His thoughts are entirely on the voyage to Constantinople.