Voltaire's correspondence immediately following the earthquake provides complete evidence of the extent of his concern. On November 24, 1755, he wrote to one of the Tronchin brothers in Lyon that it now would be hard to see how the laws of motion lead to such awful catastrophes in the "best of all possible worlds." Again he commented how mere chance often determined the fate of the individual. He wondered what the clergy would say, especially the officials of the Inquisition, if their palace still stood in Lisbon. Voltaire expressed the hope that the Inquisitors had been crushed like the others, for that would teach humanity a lesson in tolerance: the Inquisitors burn some fanatics, but the earth swallows the holy man and heretic alike. In a letter to M. Bertrand, dated four days later, he again discussed the earthquake and asked whether Alexander Pope would have dared to say that all is well if he had been in Lisbon on the fateful day. In other letters, Voltaire also challenged both philosophy and religion.
Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne was written during the early days of December 1755. It was a work of accretion, the final version published in 1756 one hundred and eighty lines in length.
Voltaire's poem properly may be called an indispensable introduction to Candide; in both works he came to grips with reality. Practically every question advanced in the poem appears at least implicitly in the prose tale. Both are savage attacks upon optimism. Aside from form and medium, the essential difference between the two works lies in the fact that irony, mockery, ridicule, high spirits, and broad humor have no place in the poem. Voltaire was deadly serious throughout, and the tone is one of deep pity for the lot of humanity in a world where both the innocent and the guilty are pawns of fate.
