Zadig: A New Translation
Zadig is a young Babylonian philosopher - wise, honest, virtuous, and entirely unprepared for the consequences of being all three. His first love abandons him for a man less decent than himself. His second proves faithless. His scientific observations land him in prison, where he learns that being right is not the same as being safe. He rises to become prime minister of Babylon and falls in love with the queen, which is exactly the kind of wisdom that forces a man to become a fugitive. In succession he is a slave, a wanderer through Egypt and Arabia, a traveler who reasons his way through every catastrophe and is undone by the next one anyway.
Along the way he performs a feat of reasoning - deducing a precise description of a horse and a dog he has never seen from their footprints in the sand - that would eventually inspire Poe's detective Dupin, and through him, Sherlock Holmes. He reverses an ancient custom of women burning themselves alive with their dead husbands, outrages the local clergy, and is rescued from execution by a widow he had previously saved. He meets an angel in the form of a hermit who explains that all apparent evil is necessary for cosmic order, that nothing happens by chance, and that Zadig should submit to fate. Zadig has a question about that.
First published in 1747 under the title Memnon, histoire orientale - anonymously, in Amsterdam, with a false London imprint, because Voltaire had learned through experience what French censors did with thinly veiled satire of the royal court - the novella appeared in its definitive form as Zadig ou la Destin e in 1748. It is the first of Voltaire's contes philosophiques and the older sibling of Candide, written twelve years before that more famous work refined and darkened the same vision. Its Babylon is eighteenth-century France in Oriental costume; its corrupt ministers and fanatical priests are the ministers and priests Voltaire dealt with every day; its central question - whether a world this arbitrary could possibly be governed by reason - is the question that drove the entire Enlightenment.
Zadig is Voltaire at his most entertaining, which is to say at his most dangerous. The comedy is the argument. The adventure is the philosophy. And Zadig's extraordinary career - from Babylonian aristocrat to slave to prime minister to fugitive to king - is the proof.
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