Candide

Voltaire employs verbal irony, metaphor, and simile in his depiction of the battle between the Bulgarian and Abarian armies: 

THERE WAS NEVER anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.

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After escaping from the Bulgarian army, Candide flees to Holland, where he meets an ill and impoverished old man who, to his surprises, is revealed to be Professor Pangloss. In their conversation concerning Pangloss’s poor state of health, the result of a venereal disease, Pangloss and Candide both use various metaphors to describe love: 

Alas!” said the other, “it was love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sensible beings, love, tender love.” 

“Alas!” said Candide, “I know this love, that sovereign of hearts, that soul of our souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks on the backside. How could this beautiful cause produce in you an effect so abominable?”

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In his comedic depiction of upper-class French society, Voltaire employs metaphor, allusion, and satire. After leaving South America with some of the valuable gold and diamonds which he received in El Dorado, Candide travels to France, where, accompanied by Martin and the Abbé of Périgord, he visits a building where upper-class men engage in card-playing, debate, and prostitution. There, Candide asks a French scholar if he agrees with Pangloss’s argument, derived from Leibniz, that Earth is “the best of all possible worlds.” The scholar responds: 

“I know nothing of all that; I find that all goes awry with me; that no one knows either what is his rank, nor what is his condition, what he does nor what he ought to do; and that except supper, which is always gay, and where there appears to be enough concord, all the rest of the time is passed in impertinent quarrels; Jansenist against Molinist, Parliament against the Church, men of letters against men of letters, courtesans against courtesans, financiers against the people, wives against husbands, relatives against relatives—it is eternal war.”

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At the end of the novel, the primary cast of characters, including Candide, find themselves in Turkey, where the last of Candide’s gold from El Dorado is spent in securing a modest farm upon which they can live. When Candide, Pangloss, and Martin visit a Dervish who is renowned as the greatest philosopher in Turkey, Candide asks him about human nature, and the philosopher responds to his question with a metaphor: 

“Master,” said he, “we come to beg you to tell why so strange an animal as man was made.”

“With what meddlest thou?” said the Dervish; “is it thy business?”

“But, reverend father,” said Candide, “there is horrible evil in this world.”

 “What signifies it,” said the Dervish, “whether there be evil or good? When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?”

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