Chapter 29 — Cunégonde, ugly

While Candide, the Baron, Pangloss, Martin, and Cacambo are recounting their adventures and reasoning about contingent and non-contingent events, about effects and causes, moral and physical evil, liberty and necessity, they arrive at the house of the Transylvanian prince on the banks of the Propontis. The first sight that meets their eyes is Cunégonde and the old woman hanging towels out to dry.

The Baron goes pale. Tender, loving Candide, seeing his beautiful Cunégonde weather-beaten, her eyes bloodshot, her neck withered, her cheeks wrinkled, and her arms rough and red, recoils three paces in horror — and then comes forward out of good manners. She embraces Candide and her brother; they embrace the old woman; Candide pays the ransom for both women. There is a small farm in the neighborhood which the old woman suggests Candide take as a temporary base. Cunégonde does not know she has grown ugly because no one has told her. She reminds Candide of his promise in a tone so positive that the good man does not dare refuse. He informs the Baron of his intention to marry his sister.

The Baron is having none of it. "I will not suffer such a base act on her part, and such insolence on yours. I will never be reproached with this scandalous thing; my sister's children would never be able to enter the chapters of the nobility in Germany. No; my sister shall marry only a baron of the empire." Cunégonde throws herself at his feet and bathes them with her tears. Still he is inflexible. Candide loses his temper: I have freed you from the galleys, paid your ransom and your sister's; she was a scullery maid, she is very ugly, I am so generous as to marry her anyway, and you dare to oppose? I would kill you all over again, if I consulted only my anger. "You may kill me again," says the Baron, "but you shall not marry my sister, at least while I am living." Voltaire has set up the running joke for its third payoff.