All 30 chapters — Westphalia to the little farm outside Constantinople.
The novel is a picaresque — a hero passed from disaster to disaster, each one a different corner of human cruelty. The structure is the argument. No single chapter could refute Pangloss; thirty of them, one after another, do. The pacing is unhurried in the prose and brutal in the events: a battlefield in two paragraphs, a city destroyed in three, a family murdered in a sentence. The final chapter is six pages long and ends in a vegetable garden.
Westphalia, the Bulgarian war, Holland, the Lisbon earthquake, the auto-da-fé, the flight to Cadiz.
Westphalia. Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds. Cunégonde sees an "experimental philosophy" lesson in the bushes and decides to repeat it with Candide behind a screen. The Baron walks past. Candide is kicked out before lunch.
Two strangers in blue treat him to dinner and ask his height. Before he understands the trick he has been clapped in irons and is being drilled in the Bulgarian army. He is flogged thirty-six times for taking a walk. The King passes by and pardons him.
Trumpets, drums, cannon: thirty thousand dead in an afternoon. Two villages destroyed "in accordance with the laws of war." In Holland, a Protestant orator drives Candide off; an Anabaptist named James, who has never been baptised, takes him in. The next morning he meets a beggar covered in scabs.
The beggar is Pangloss, with syphilis and news from the castle: everyone murdered, Cunégonde apparently dead. Pangloss traces his disease through a Franciscan, a countess, a captain, a Jesuit, all the way back to Columbus, and concludes it was a necessary ingredient of the best world.
The ship sinks; James drowns saving a sailor who curses him; Pangloss explains a priori that the Bay of Lisbon was made on purpose. They reach the city as the ground starts shaking. Thirty thousand dead. Candide lies bleeding. Pangloss explains the sulfur vein.
The University of Coimbra rules that burning a few people alive will prevent further earthquakes. Pangloss is hanged. Candide is whipped in time to the singing. The earth shakes again that afternoon. An old woman appears: "Take courage and follow me."
The old woman tends Candide's wounds in a hovel, then leads him to a richly furnished apartment in the country and seats him on a sofa. A veiled lady is helped into the room. He lifts the veil with a timid hand. It is Cunégonde, alive — Pangloss had been wrong.
Cunégonde tells her story. The Bulgarian raid; the captain; the Jewish merchant Don Issachar; the Grand Inquisitor. Issachar and the Inquisitor have agreed to share her on alternate days. She saw Pangloss hanged and Candide whipped at the auto-da-fé; she sent the old woman to fetch him.
Don Issachar attacks; Candide kills him. The Grand Inquisitor walks in; Candide kills him too. The old woman organizes a flight on three horses to Cadiz, noting that she can only sit on one buttock — a mystery she does not yet explain.
Their money is stolen — probably by a Franciscan. They sell a horse and reach Cadiz, where Candide's Bulgarian drill earns him command of a company bound for Paraguay. On the voyage Cunégonde claims no one has suffered as she has; the old woman replies, "If I were to show you my backside, you would suspend your judgment."
The Old Woman's tale, Buenos Aires, Jesuit Paraguay, the Oreillons, El Dorado.
The old woman tells her story. The daughter of Pope Urban X and a princess. Her fiancé was poisoned by his mistress; her ship was taken by Salé pirates; she was sold into slavery in Morocco, fought over by armies, and left for dead on a heap of corpses. A weeping Italian-speaking eunuch found her there.
Sold to the Dey of Algiers, she catches plague. Sold across Africa to Constantinople, she becomes property of an Aga at the siege of Azov, where the besieged Janissaries cut off and eat one buttock from each woman. A French surgeon cures her. She has wanted to kill herself a hundred times.
Buenos Aires. The Governor — Don Fernando d'Ibaraa y Figueora y Mascarenes y Lampourdos y Souza — decides at once to have Cunégonde. Before she has answered him, the Franciscan thief is hanged in Spain and confesses; the Inquisition's police arrive to take Candide. He flees with a new valet, Cacambo.
Cacambo proposes they fight for the Jesuits instead of against them. They reach the kingdom of three hundred leagues, where "the Fathers own everything and the people own nothing." The German Commandant in his arbor turns out to be Cunégonde's brother, alive after all.
The Baron explains how he survived the Bulgarian massacre. Reunion gives way to outrage when Candide announces he intends to marry Cunégonde — she has seventy-two quarterings, he has none. The Baron strikes him; Candide runs him through and weeps. Cacambo dresses Candide in the Baron's Jesuit habit and gallops them through the checkpoint.
In a meadow, two naked girls are pursued by two monkeys biting their buttocks. Candide shoots the monkeys. The girls weep — the monkeys were their lovers. The Oreillons capture both travelers and prepare to cook a Jesuit. Cacambo's diplomatic speech saves them.
A canoe through a vault of rocks delivers them into a hidden Inca kingdom. Children play quoits with rubies and emeralds. The schoolmaster waves the gems away. The inn serves a two-hundred-pound condor and three hundred hummingbirds, and laughs when they try to pay in gold.
An old man explains the kingdom — no priests, no lawsuits, no prisons, a religion that thanks God and asks Him nothing. Greeted by the King with a kiss on each cheek. They spend a month. Then they ask to leave: Candide wants Cunégonde, and wants to be richer than the kings of Europe. The King builds a machine.
Surinam, the Atlantic, France, England, Venice, Pococurante.
On the road to Surinam, a slave with one hand and one leg. "That's the price at which you eat sugar in Europe." Candide finally renounces optimism. The Dutch captain Vanderdendur swindles him out of his sheep loaded with diamonds. He sends Cacambo to ransom Cunégonde and selects Martin as his companion.
Martin and Candide debate moral and physical evil across the Atlantic. Two ships fight; one sinks with all hands; "this is how men treat each other." Then one of Candide's lost El Dorado sheep is recovered, swimming red beside the ship. He is more overjoyed at the one sheep than grieved at the hundred.
Martin's summary of France: half the people fools, half too clever, the main occupations love, slander, nonsense. The chapter ends with the famous skeptical exchange: have men always been brigands and hypocrites? — "Have hawks always eaten pigeons?" Reasoning like this they reach Bordeaux.
Paris: physicians, a Périgordian abbé, the salon of the Marquise de Parolignac, fifty thousand francs lost at faro, two diamonds extorted on a sofa, a forged letter from "Cunégonde," an arrest, three diamonds in bribes. He is put on a Dutch ship for Portsmouth instead of Venice — and thinks he has escaped from hell.
Portsmouth harbor. An admiral is shot for not killing enough of the enemy: "in this country it is considered good, from time to time, to kill an Admiral, in order to encourage the others." Candide refuses to set foot on shore. They sail past Lisbon and finally reach Venice.
In Venice he searches for Cacambo and Cunégonde — neither comes. He bets Martin that the cheerful-looking Theatine and his pretty companion in St Mark's Square are happy. The girl is Paquette, the chambermaid from the castle; both confess misery. Martin wins the bet. Candide gives them three thousand piastres anyway.
The visit to Senator Pococurante on the Brenta. He owns Raphaels he doesn't like, finds Homer boring, Virgil flat, Milton barbarous. Candide marvels at the independence of judgment. Martin diagnoses it: there is some pleasure in having no pleasure. The garden, too, will be replanted next week.
Six dethroned kings, Constantinople, the reunion, the garden.
Cacambo reappears as a slave at the inn — and Cunégonde is in Constantinople. At the table, six foreigners are addressed as "Your Majesty" by their valets. They are six actual dethroned kings, in Venice for Carnival, all of them historical figures Voltaire's readers in 1759 would have recognized at once.
On the galley to Constantinople, Cacambo reports that Cunégonde has become ugly. Candide insists he will marry her anyway. Boarding another galley, he notices two of the oarsmen — and they are Pangloss and the young Baron, both of whom he had seen die. He pays their ransom too.
The Baron survived Candide's sword. Pangloss survived the rope (it was wet), the dissection (a surgeon's incision made him scream), and slavery in the galleys. Candide asks whether he still thinks everything is for the best. Pangloss: I am a philosopher; I cannot retract my views; Leibniz cannot be wrong.
Cunégonde and the old woman are hanging out laundry on the Propontis. Cunégonde is wrinkled and ugly. Candide recoils three paces, then comes forward to embrace her. He agrees to marry her out of honor. The Baron refuses again — her children could never enter the German nobility. Candide is ready to kill him again.
The Baron is shipped off to Rome by Cacambo's clever plan. The little community settles on a Turkish farm. They visit the Dervish ("hold your tongue") and the old farmer ("our labor preserves us from boredom, vice, and want"). Candide cuts off Pangloss's last lecture: il faut cultiver notre jardin.