Chapter 4 — Pangloss diseased; the news of the castle

Candide, more moved by compassion than horror, gives the beggar his two florins. The beggar stares at him intently, weeps, and falls on his neck. Candide recoils. The beggar asks if he no longer recognizes his dear Pangloss. Candide is overwhelmed. He carries Pangloss to the Anabaptist's stable. The first question is about Cunégonde. She is dead, says Pangloss. Candide faints. She was raped, Pangloss reports, then disemboweled by Bulgarian soldiers; her father killed; her mother cut to pieces; her brother treated the same; the castle demolished, not one stone on top of another.

Candide asks how Pangloss has come to this state. It was love, Pangloss replies: he has caught syphilis from Paquette, the Baroness's chambermaid. The genealogy of the disease runs through a learned Franciscan, an old countess, a cavalry captain, a marchioness, a page, a Jesuit who had it from a novice of one of Columbus's companions. Candide cries that the Devil must be the original source. Not at all, Pangloss replies: it was a necessary ingredient in the best of all possible worlds; had Columbus not caught the disease in America, Europe would now have neither chocolate nor cochineal.

Pangloss must be cured, and has no money. The Anabaptist James pays for the treatment. Pangloss loses only an eye and an ear. James makes him bookkeeper. Two months later, James has business in Lisbon and takes the two philosophers along on his ship. Pangloss explains on the voyage that everything is so constituted that it could not be better. James is not of this opinion. Men, he says, were not born wolves and have become wolves; God gave them neither cannons nor bayonets. Pangloss replies that all this was indispensable, for private misfortunes make up the general good. While he is reasoning, the sky darkens, the wind blows from all four quarters, and the ship is battered by a violent tempest within sight of the port of Lisbon.