[In the essay which follows, Howells reviews the representation of cities in Voltaire's contes, focusing on the “carnivalesque” as described by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Howells suggests that Babylon is the paradigmatic secular city for Voltaire, being the antithesis of a holy city and thus a manifestation of carnivalesque inversion. Howells cites passages from several contes that depict the “body in process”: the human body participating in sex, eating, and violence.]

This will be a ‘carnivalesque’ reading of representations of the city, the market-place and the meal in the Contes. First I shall establish briefly the concept of the carnivalesque, and what it might say about the Enlightenment and Voltaire's tales. Then I shall run through the general significance of my three referents within received culture. Pausing for an excursus on Babylon, I shall look finally at a series of passages treating my three referents in the Contes.¹ These take us from civilized order to violent disorder.

The concept of the carnivalesque was established by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). He derives it from the phenomenon of carnival, which he sees as a social event but also as the embodiment of a certain consciousness and as a privileged figure of reality. The carnival is public and collective—everybody participates. It is concrete and dynamic. It is disorderly and often violent, yet strongly ritualized. It is playful, allowing changes of individual identity (masking) and of social hierarchy (the clown as king). It is parodic, mocking and joyous. In all these ways it breaks down the official order. It represents—in both senses—the world in its heterogeneity and perpetual change.

Within the carnivalesque, the central notion is that of the ‘grotesque body’. ‘Body’ signifies materiality; ‘grotesque’ signifies openness and incompletion. Thus the grotesque body represents corporeal process. We can identify it on several levels of reality. One is the human body; another is the collective body of the group or community; a third is the total body of reality or the world. The fourth is that of language, the medium through which we cognize the world and communicate with each other. Language too has a body. Language too is a perpetually unfinished process. This is what Bakhtin means by ‘dialogism’. Language in use is always borrowed, quoted, composed of fragments of different discourses, re-contextualized and re-used. Meaning always remains open. Utterance which claims self-consistency, affirms its authority and seeks to fix meaning aspires to monologism. But it is inevitably broken down, re-opened, re-carnivalized. Literature stylizes dialogism. Truthful literature is the kind which represents the carnivalesque reality on all levels and as fully as possible.²

It is easy to see why Rabelais serves Bakhtin as the richest example of carnivalesque literature. But Rabelais is the fullest reflection of his time, notably the inheritance of medieval popular culture and the condition of the Renaissance—plural, conflictual and changing. French Classicism will impose cultural order and hierarchy. The Enlightenment with its high civilization and abstract rationalism seems still farther from the carnivalesque consciousness.³ But every age expresses the truth in its own forms. In the age of Voltaire the forms of the carnivalesque are, precisely, civilized. The Enlightenment is an oppositional movement within the framework of received high culture. Enlightenment writing is playful and parodic. Its stock-in-trade is wit and open meaning. It uses the concrete and the corporeal, albeit sparingly and often negatively, to debase the pretentions of official discourse. It tends to adapt popular forms (the letter, the tale, the novel) and create hybrid genres. Voltaire's contes philosophiques have all these characteristics. They constitute indeed a joyously aggressive rewriting, a carnivalizing, of official literature and philosophy.

All my three referents—city, market-place and meal—appear quite frequently in the Contes. But we should observe first that all three have long functioned as archetypes within Western culture. They have mythical power as emblems of human community and human communion. This emblematic significance is evident in both the secular and the Christian traditions. First, the city. In the secular tradition we might think of Plato's Republic. In the Christian tradition we have The City of God of St Augustine. Bridging them we have Campanella's City of the Sun. For the market-place, in the secular tradition we have the agora or the forum, the place of collective meeting and debate. We have the fair and the stock-exchange. On the Christian side this is more difficult. Christ drove the money-changers out of the temple (Mark, xi); but He spent much time in public places, with the people. For the meal we have Plato's Banquet, the Symposium. On the other side we might invoke Luther's Table-talk (Tischreden). And of course we have the Last Supper. This was also in some sense the first supper: the shared meal instituting the ritual of Christian communion.

Thus my three referents are powerful, and multivalent, emblems of community. They are germane because the Contes deal in community. They function by offering, for the benefit of the protagonist and ourselves, a review of reality. For Voltaire, as a classical writer, reality is human and social. Primarily it is represented as the city. Most of the Contes are set in cities or involve visits to cities. One city featured prominently is Babylon. Zadig begins and ends there. Le Taureau blanc ends there. La Princesse de Babylone not only begins and ends there, but bestows on Babylon the honour of being the only city to appear in a title. Why Babylon? For Voltaire, and for the culture that we still share with him, Babylon is the secular city. It is the city of pride, luxury and disorder. It is the worldly antithesis—and thus the debasing parody—of Jerusalem, the holy city.

The disorder of the secular city is in the first instance verbal. Here is the opening presentation:

Au temps du roi Moabdar il y avait à Babylone un jeune homme nommé Zadig, né avec un beau naturel fortifié par l'éducation. […] On était étonné de voir qu'avec beaucoup d'esprit il n'insultât jamais par des railleries à ces propos si vagues, si rompus, si tumultueux, à ces médisances téméraires, à ces décisions ignorantes, à ces turlupinades grossières, à ce vain bruit de paroles, qu'on nommait conversation dans Babylone.

(Zadig, i, p. 57)

The Old Testament identifies Babylon with Babel. Here is part of the Biblical account of the fall from Divine order into human disorder:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. …

And they said to one another, Go to, …, let us build us a city and a tower …

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.

(Genesis, xi, 1-9)

The second extract tells us that the Divine language is one. It is monologic. Human language however becomes confounded, dialogic, clashing and unresolved. This is the language of Babylon. Our first extract tells us of its confusion. Zadig the hero seems to be out of sympathy with it. But the text presents it joyously. Indeed the text mimes the verbal carnival in its own style. It accumulates phrases; it defamiliarizes and restores body to language (by foregrounding the code). The procedure is totalizing and ludic. This is a secular text, mocking and celebrating the secular city.

Babylon is the antithesis of the holy city most specifically because it is the place where the Lord's people were enslaved. Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem and carried the Jews into the Babylonish captivity (II Kings, xxiv and xxv; Daniel, i). The Old Testament prophets are understandably fascinated with Babylon. It is called ‘the golden city’ (Isaiah, xiv, 4), and ‘the glory of kingdoms’ (Isaiah, xiii, 19). Divine vengeance is to come. During a great secular meal—Belshazzar's feast—the Lord inscribes the end of Nebuchadnezzar's dynasty (Daniel, v). Conquered in its turn, ‘Babylon … that made all the earth drunken, … is suddenly fallen and destroyed’. (Jeremiah, li, 7 and 8)

But Babylon will remain, in the Judeo-Christian inheritance, as the type of the sinful city. In the last book of the New Testament it is the Great Whore. ‘I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, … and on her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great’. (Revelations, xvii, 5) St Augustine evokes his sinful youth with the phrase ‘I walked the streets of Babylon, and wallowed in the mire thereof’ (Confessions, II, 3). After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the leading minister Pierre Jurieu addressed the oppressed French Protestants in a series of Lettres pastorales aux fidèles qui gémissent sous la captivité de Babylone (1686-95). The Rastafarian movement for Black Liberation in our century invokes Babylon as a symbol of tyranny. The first Rasta demonstration, in Jamaica in 1958, sang the spiritual ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ (cp. Psalm 137). ‘The name Babylon was linked to all oppressive forces, whether it was the imperialist states, the local black oppressors or the police.’⁴

In more secular modern discourses too Babylon retains its mythical status. It may be the synecdoche of corruption. Kenneth Anger's exposé of the mores of the American movie industry was entitled Hollywood Babylon (1975). It may still be the emblem of the modern city. Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis (1926) includes the story of Babel. Narrated by the spiritual leader of the oppressed workers, it functions as the mise en abyme of Metropolis itself, the city without a soul. It may be used more playfully. The opening of the most notorious novel of recent times has two Indians falling towards ‘the great, rotting, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville’. The metaphorical and the literal names of this city are later run together in the carnivalesque coinage ‘Babylondon’. This novel is Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988). The title alludes to the improper insertion of unauthorized utterance into the authorized text. This is the dialogic intrusion, the carnivalization of official discourse, that the Contes also practice.

The Contes use other great cities. Their status is clearly analogous to that of Babylon. Persepolis is the city that Babouc is required to review in Le Monde comme il va. The name designates the capital—the polis of the Persian Empire. The tale constitutes a parodic rewriting of the Book of Jonah, in which the Word of the Lord required Jonah to ‘go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it’. Joyously jumbling his oriental metropoli, Voltaire uses Nineveh as the location of Memnon. Other cities appear, like Babylon, in more than one tale. These include Benares (Lettre d'un Turc, Les Lettres d'Amabed); Rome (Scarmentado, La Princesse de Babylone, Éloge de la raison). Paris is featured in over half a dozen tales.

These other favoured cities are evidently emblematic too. Rome is a capital twice over, embracing both the ancient pagan and the modern Christian empires. Venice embraces two other antithetical empires: land and sea. Both these cities had also become bywords for decadence. Sic transit gloria is one of the ironic (and literally secular) meanings conveyed by Voltaire's choice of cities. The odd one out seems to be Benares, the Hindu holy city. But thus it functions as Rome (the holy city) and anti-Rome (the antithesis of the corrupt Christian holy city). Each of these cities indeed is assigned at least two identities. Each is both ‘itself’ and the ‘other’ city which is the capital for Voltaire's readership—Paris. More exactly, each is a radically stylized and internally carnivalized caricature of ‘itself’ (bisexual cardinals; carnival maskers; ridiculous fakirs: spot the cities), and at the same time a satirical version of the ‘other’ which is Paris. The lack of specificity and density in Voltaire's writing (the lack of carnivalesque body) makes the equivalence easier. Paris ‘itself’ is a setting in many of the later and more realist tales. Here the name has a stronger referential function. But even Paris still has massive emblematic weight. Paris is the worldly city. Thus it is Babylon. A contemporary work by Fougeret de Montbron (to which Candide allegedly owes a debt) is called La Capitale des Gaules ou la Nouvelle Babylone.⁵

Time for a civilized meal.

Zadig […] avait, dans un faubourg de Babylone, une maison ornée avec goût, où il rassemblait tous les arts et tous les plaisirs dignes d'un honnête homme. Le matin, sa bibliothèque était ouverte à tous les savants; le soir, sa table l'était à la bonne compagnie.

(iv, p. 65)

The writing here is very normative. The imperfect tense indicates that these events are not particular but habitual; the ‘tous’, itself repeated, eschews particularity for generality. Cultural norms are equally evident: ‘avec goût’, ‘dignes d'un honnête homme’. On the other hand we do have a totalizing figure. ‘Tous’ is collective, here designating successively three totalities. ‘Il rassemblait’ marks multiplicity being brought together; ‘dans sa maison’ has exteriority housed. Oppositions are yoked together: ‘le matin/le soir’, ‘sa bibliothèque/sa table’, ‘les savants/la bonne compagnie’. These polarities imply the whole—civilized—range between them. We also have, literally, the concept of openness. The collective figure is reversed and doubled as the text continues. ‘Il s'éleva une grande dispute …’. We move into the tense of particularity, as order becomes disorder.

Next a market-place. In another figure of reversal, Zadig the prime minister becomes Zadig the slave. He and his servant are put up for sale:

sa personne fut exposée en vente dans la place publique; ainsi que celle de son compagnon de voyage. Un marchand arabe, nommé Sétoc, y mit l'enchère; mais le valet, plus propre à la fatigue, fut vendu bien plus chèrement que le maître. On ne faisait pas de comparaison entre ces deux hommes. Zadig fut donc esclave subordonné à son valet: on les attacha ensemble. …

(x, pp. 82-83)

Within the passage the figure of order—the hierarchy of master and slave, implying the totality of the social order—is reversed. The slave is much more valuable. Their new hierarchy is the world upside-down, the master subordinated to the slave. But then the two are physically joined together. They are turned into a single, grotesque body.

Our last example from Zadig gives us the city and the market-place and the meal together.

Sétoc, qui ne pouvait se séparer de cet homme en qui habitait la sagesse, le mena à la grande foire de Balzora, où devaient se rendre les plus grands négociants de la terre habitable. Ce fut pour Zadig une consolation sensible de voir tant d'hommes de diverses contrées réunis dans la même place. Il lui paraissait que l'univers était une grande famille qui se rassemblait à Balzora. Il se trouva à table, dès le second jour, avec un Égyptien, un Indien gangaride, un habitant du Cathay, un Grec, un Celte, et plusieurs autres étrangers qui, dans leurs fréquents voyages vers le golfe arabique, avaient appris assez d'arabe pour se fair entendre. L'Égyptien paraissait fort en colère. …

(xii, p. 87)

The first sentence presents the market-place (‘la foire’) within the city (Balzora) which is in turn within the great world. We have three totalities, each successively en abyme or contained by the one following it. The next two sentences repeat this figure in a simpler form. ‘Tant d'hommes’ (multiplicity) ‘de diverses contrées’ (heterogeneity) are to be ‘réunis’ (participle of union) ‘dans la même place’. Again but more dynamically, ‘l'univers’ (totality) ‘[comme] une grande famille’ (a vast kinship) ‘se rassemblait’ (active verb of coming together) ‘à Balzora’. Then we have the meal, and enumeration of the totality who commune. Five heterogeneous representatives are listed; the list is also left open. A modicum of verbal communication is possible. But then the figure is reversed and doubled. Union again becomes disunion. The issue of holiness causes an unholy row. Zadig will restore union, with his monologic (unitarian) wisdom. But what makes the text joyous is the heterogeneous and dynamic figure we have just identified.

Next we take instances from Le Monde comme il va. (The title itself suggests the worldly totality in motion.) Babouc comes to Persepolis.

Il arriva dans cette ville immense […].

Babouc se mêla dans la foule d'un peuple composé de ce qu'il y avait de plus sale et de plus laid dans les deux sexes. Cette foule se précipitait d'un air hébété dans un enclos vaste et sombre.

(ii, p. 42)

The individual enters the city. Within it he is taken into the crowd. (A gross lot: popular heterogeneity and corporality are usually treated negatively in the Contes.) The figure of exteriority taken inside is repeated in the second sentence (the ‘enclos’). Babouc will eventually escape from the mob. He crosses the city to ‘l'autre bout’. On the way he admires its ‘places [publiques]’. He is going to a luncheon. ‘Il entra enfin chez la dame qui l'attendait à dîner avec une compagnie d'honnétes gens.’ Thus Babouc is taken in once more, but this time to a very different collectivity. This second group issues formal invitations; it is not public but quasi-private; it is not gross but highly civilized. The other end of the city is also the other end of the society, thus implying the totalities between.

The orderly ‘compagnie’ however has its own version of disorder, and even of corporality. Voltaire, through his observer Babouc, presents us with a delightful figure.

Cependant il s'aperçut que la dame, qui avait commencé par demander tendrement des nouvelles de son mari, parlait plus tendrement encore, sur la fin du repas, à un jeune mage. Il vit un magistrat qui, en présence de sa femme, pressait avec vivacité une veuve, et cette veuve indulgente avait une main passée autour du cou du magistrat, tandis qu'elle tendait l'autre à un jeune citoyen très beau et très modeste.

(iv, p. 43)

The first sentence marks a temporal polarity centred on the meal (‘commencé/à la fin’), which is paralleled by the affective polarity centred on the lady. Between two men, she desires both: the absent husband (‘tendrement’) and the present cenobite (‘plus tendrement’). In the next sentence the figure of the trio is reversed, to give us a man between two women. But this time both are present. And we are beginning to move from the verbal to the corporeal. ‘Pressait avec vivacité une veuve’ may be only moral pressure. ‘[Avoir] un main passée autour du cou du magistrat’ is clearly physical. It also takes us from unilateral initiatives to a reciprocation. Then the second chain of three becomes a chain of four, as the widow ‘tend … l'autre [main] à un jeune citoyen’. The interweaving of limbs joins the individuals in a grotesque body. The participants are a conspectus of good society. First social ritual, then the meal, then desire, then corporality brings them together.

So far we have failed to recognize the contribution of the natural world. The most famous example of the impact of natural events in the Contes is surely the Lisbon earthquake. It carnivalizes the city. But then man makes his contribution too.

Ils sentent la terre trembler sous leurs pas; la mer s'élève en bouillonnant dans le port, et brise les vaisseaux qui sont à l'ancre. Des tourbillons de flammes et de cendres couvrent les rues et les places publiques; les maisons s'écroulent, les toits sont renversés sur les fondements, et les fondements se dispersent; trente mille habitants de tout âge et de tout sexe sont écrasés sous les ruines. Le matelot disait en sifflant et en jurant: ‘Il y aura quelque chose à gagner ici’.—Quelle peut être la raison suffisante de ce phénomène? disait Pangloss.—Voici le dernier jour du monde! s'écriait Candide. Le matelot court incontinent au milieu des débris, affronte la mort pour trouver de l'argent, s'en empare, s'enivre, et, ayant cuvé son vin, achète les faveurs de la première fille de bonne volonté qu'il rencontre sur les ruines des maisons détruites et au milieu des mourants et des morts.

(Candide, v, p. 156)

At the start of the passage the earth trembles—the static becomes dynamic. That which is low rises up (‘la mer s'élève’). That which is raised comes down (‘les maisons s'écroulent’). High and low become one (‘les toits sont renversés sur les fondements’). The construct is taken back into nature (‘les fondements se dispersent’). To this disaster we then have three responses. They are strongly marked off, in parallel, as a conspectus. First is the sailor. His reaction is that of the lower classes. He whistles and swears (but Voltaire's classical decorum excludes direct representation of this base level of utterance). He looks out for himself. Pangloss the intellectual seeks to explain the event in terms of his theory. Candide the naïf has a more primal reaction (‘s'écria’), invoking apocalypse. The sailor is the first to act. The common man's ‘sagesse du ventre’ is almost literal, as he purchases first drink and then sex. But what is striking in him is surely the phenomenon of vital energy. Promptly and almost blindly (‘incontinent’) he runs into the danger zone. The rapid succession of verbs in the historic present (‘en trouve, s'en empare, s'enivre’) mimics the velocity of his acts. He appropriates and is appropriated, in a series of material exchanges. He shows us appetite pursued amid disaster, life active amid death.

Our penultimate passage is from Les Lettres d'Amabed. It is a very disturbing text. The fictional author of this passage is called Adaté. She is a young, vegetarian Hindu. Unjustly jailed, she has just been raped by the Catholic missionary Father Fa tutto. The letter which should be a pathetic protest contains other meanings of which the writer is supposedly unaware. They are centred on a meal.

Je ne m'étais nourrie depuis un jour que de ma douleur. On ne nous a point apporté à manger à l'heure accoutumée. Déra [la suivante] s'en étonnait et s'en plaignait. Il me paraissait bien honteux de manger après ce qui nous était arrivé. Cependant nous avions un appétit dévorant. Rien ne venait, et, après nous être pâmées de douleur, nous évanouissions de faim.

Enfin, sur le soir, on nous a servi une tourte de pigeonneaux, une poularde et deux perdrix, avec un seul petit pain; et, pour comble d'outrage, une bouteille de vin sans eau. C'est le tour le plus sanglant qu'on puisse jouer à deux femmes comme nous, après tout ce que nous avions souffert, mais que faire? Je me suis mise à genoux: ‘Ô Birmah! ô Visnou! ô Brahma! vous savez que l'âme n'est point souillée de ce qui entre dans le corps. Si vous m'avez donné une âme, pardonnez-lui la nécessité funeste où est mon corps de n'être pas réduit aux légumes; je sais que c'est un péché horrible de manger du poulet; mais on nous y force. Puissent tant de crimes retomber sur la tête du père Fa tutto! Qu'il soit, après sa mort, changé en une jeune malheureuse Indienne; que je sois changée en dominicain; que je lui rende tous les maux qu'il m'a faits, et que je sois plus impitoyable encore pour lui qu'il ne l'a été pour moi.’ Ne sois point scandalisé, pardonne, vertueux Shastasid! Nous nous sommes mises à table. Qu'il est dur d'avoir des plaisirs qu'on se reproche!

(Les Lettres d'Amabed, p. 495)

We are presented with a situation in which innocence has been assaulted by tyranny. Innocence is doubly gentle—female, and vegetarian. Tyranny is a lascivious monk. We might expect from this—and from everything that we know about Voltaire and ‘l'infâme’—to be reading one of his cruder denunciations of the Church. On the surface this is the case. The underlying sense however negates the ethical position. The passage clearly suggests that being raped is equivalent to eating meat, that Adaté actually enjoys both, and that they are part of a perpetual cycle of violation.

The equivalence is indicated in the first paragraph in several ways. Adaté reveals that after the rape she is very hungry. She feels the latter ‘appétit’ while disapproving of it. By implication she may also have had a sexual ‘appétit’—for being raped—while disapproving of it. The link is also suggested by the adjective ‘dévorant’, connoting violence, and the parallel between the two causes of fainting. More exactly, ‘dévorant’ anticipates the meat-eating in the second paragraph. Her condemnation of consuming roasted fowl and wine—‘un péché horrible’—seems quite excessive. If so, perhaps being raped is no great sin either. The equivalence is underlined by the reference to ‘ce qui entre dans le corps’. This phrase is applicable equally to food and to sexual penetration. In both cases indeed ‘on nous y force’. Her real appetite is then shown to us, under the guise of revenge, and through the Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis. She wishes that her role and Fa tutto's could be exchanged, and hopes that this will occur in a future re-incarnation. This not only reverses the figure of violence. It suggests that over time such reversals do occur. The whole passage thus offers a startling carnivalesque account of reality. Eating, as well as sex, constitutes the entry of one body into another. Over time, identities are exchanged and relations are reversed. This is carnal knowledge in the fullest sense. It is also the knowledge of violence, emphasized here in both the alimentary and the sexual transaction. Ethics has nothing to do with it. Corporeal violation is the life cycle.⁶

The confrontation between ethics and violence is set out in my last passage. This is from Adventure indienne. The setting is—again—significant. A visit to the East was believed to have given the Greek philosopher Pythagoras many of his doctrines, including vegetarianism and metempsychosis. Pythagoras is the protagonist. Re-entering the city, on his way to the market-place, he contemplates the universal meal.

Comme il rêvait profondément à cette aventure en retournant à la ville, il vit des araignées qui mangeaient des mouches, des hirondelles qui mangeaient des araignées, des éperviers qui mangeaient des hirondelles. ‘Tout ces gens-là, dit-il, ne sont pas philosophes.’

Pythagore, en entrant, fut heurté, froissé, renversé par une multitude de gredins et de gredines qui couraient en criant: ‘C'est bien fait, c'est bien fait, ils l'ont bien mérité.—Qui? quoi? dit Pythagore en se relevant; et les gens couraient toujours en disant: ‘Ah! que nous aurons du plaisir à les voir cuire!’

Pythagore crut qu'on parlait de lentilles ou de quelques autres légumes; point du tout, c'était de deux pauvres Indiens. ‘Ah! sans doute, dit Pythagore, ce sont deux grands philosophes qui sont las de la vie; ils sont bien aises de renaître sous une autre forme; il y a du plaisir à changer de maison, quoiqu'on soit toujours mal logé; il ne faut pas disputer des goûts.’

Il avança avec la foule jusqu'à la place publique, et ce fut là qu'il vit un grand bûcher allumé.

(Aventure indienne, p. 282)

In the first paragraph Pythagoras observes the natural world. He sees how one species consumes another, and is consumed in its turn. Accumulation implies totalization. The practice seems to be ubiquitous. It contradicts the values of the ‘philosophes’, which are ethical and progressive. Humankind seems to stand alone in these values, as Pythagoras their proponent is at this moment literally alone. But then Pythagoras enters the city. He is promptly taken into the crowd. The event itself is emblematic (as with Babouc, but much more brutally). Entering the body will teach him the truth. The body of the world educates him by doing violence to his body. The crowd bumps him about and—an emblematic reversal of his own world—knocks him down. They are chanting their joy. The protagonist, a naïf and an intellectual, fails to understand. Learning that the festivity is prompted by the prospect of seeing two men ritually burned alive, he again misunderstands. He assumes that these are ‘deux grands philosophes’—this time the term has a stoical and oriental sense—who have freely chosen this procedure. It will enable them to ‘changer de maison [corporelle]’, to ‘renaître sous une autre forme’. As we might guess, and as the narrative will confirm, the two had no choice at all. The effect however will be the same.

Pythagoras in our final paragraph proceeds to the ‘place publique’. There he encounters the meal in the market-place in the city (as with Zadig). But the meal is human beings. Other human beings rejoice in this appalling event: ‘Ah! que nous aurons du plaisir de les voir cuire!’. Human beings do not stand apart from other species. They actually carnivalize their own species. Uniquely, though, they give collective cultural forms to the event. (The Contes themselves are, on the discursive level, such a form.) These ritual forms constitute a celebration of the universal cycle of ‘changer’ and ‘renaître’, change and rebirth.

Notes

1. All quotations will be from the Pléiade volume: Voltaire, Romans et contes, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Van den Heuvel (Paris, 1979).

2. See especially M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (English translation by Hélène Iswolsky: Cambridge Mass., 1968; Bloomington Indiana, 1984), and ‘Discourse in the novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (English translation by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, 1981).

3. See Rabelais and his World, pp. 33-4, 101-20 in both editions.

4. Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance (London, 1985), p. 101.

5. Candide, ed. A. Morize (Paris, 1913), p. 156.

6. For a reading of the whole of Les Lettres d'Amabed in these terms, see my ‘Processing Voltaire's Amabed’, British Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies vol. 10 (1987), pp. 153-62.