Candide, or Optimism (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

VOLTAIRE (François-Marie Arouet; trans. Richard Aldington; intro. Paul Morand; illus. Sylvain Sauvage). Candide, or Optimism. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1977.

Large Octavo. Full blue-grey leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xix, 131 pp. Colour frontispiece and black and white illustrations by Sylvain Sauvage throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. First Easton Press edition.

In January 1759, a slim volume appeared in Paris under the title Candide, ou l'Optimisme, attributed to a fictitious "Doctor Rarb_lph" and translated from the equally fictitious German. Voltaire denied authorship vigorously and unconvincingly. Within weeks it had been seized by the authorities in Paris, Geneva, and Rome; within months it had been translated into multiple languages and was being read across Europe. It has been in print continuously ever since.

François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) — who published under the name Voltaire from his twenties onward — had spent a career dismantling received ideas with a wit so precise and an irony so controlled that its targets rarely saw the blow coming. Candide is the culmination of that career. It was written in response to two things: the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands and seemed to demand some account from those who maintained, following Leibniz, that the Creator had arranged things in the best of all possible ways; and the Seven Years' War, then in its early stages, which was providing daily evidence of the human capacity for organised slaughter. Voltaire's instrument was a young man of unfailing good nature and Panglossian optimism — Candide, the pupil of Dr. Pangloss, who maintains to the last that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds — whom he subjected to every variety of calamity the eighteenth century could supply: war, shipwreck, earthquake, the Inquisition, slavery, and the systematic corruption of everything good. The novella ends not with a refutation of Pangloss's philosophy but with something more practical: the famous instruction to cultivate one's own garden. Whether this represents resignation, pragmatism, or wisdom is a question the text deliberately declines to resolve.

The translation is by Richard Aldington (1892–1962), the English poet, novelist, and Imagist, whose rendering captures the novella's distinctive tone — at once cheerful and devastating — with particular fidelity. The introduction is by Paul Morand (1888–1976), the French novelist, diplomat, and member of the Académie française. The illustrations by Sylvain Sauvage (1888–1948), the French Art Deco graphic artist, were originally created for the celebrated Nonesuch Press edition of 1929 and are among the most distinguished visual accompaniments the work has received.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000486