Candide; Or All for the Best: A New Translation From the French
Walter Jerrold
Paperback
(Forgotten Books, Jan. 30, 2018)
Excerpt from Candide; Or All for the Best: A New Translation From the FrenchWho returned it to him, saying that he should have abstained from including in it so many indecencies, having no need to resort to such a means of obtaining readers. It must, however, be borne in mind that Voltaire is never coarse from a mere delight in dabbling in the unclean. When the work appeared, although the title-page declared that it was translated from the German of M. Le docteur Ralph there was no well kept secret as to its true authorship. Many other of Voltaire's friends were scandalised, and he disavowed the work in a letter purporting to be written by one Demad, brother of the translator indeed he is reported to have spoken of the book himself as a bad joke. Yet it remains to-day, more than a century after the close of his long life, his best remembered work; and, whether we agree with the Duchesse de la Valliere in deprecating the indecencies as unnecessary irrelevan cies, or whether we consider them as only marking strong counts in the indictment of optimism, we cannot ignore the fact that we have in it a veritable master piece, characterised throughout by searching wit.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.