The old woman's story is one of the several examples of digression so characteristic of the romantic tale of adventure, but it provides the author with new opportunity to attack the Leibnitzian optimistic philosophy as well as to shoot his barbs of satire at other targets. The prime evidence of pervading evil in this section of Candide is the carnage of warfare. Voltaire had already established his strong views on war in the account of the Bulgarian-Abarian conflict; now he reinforced them. The conflict depicted here was far more brutal than that of Western Europe. The girl arrived in Morocco to find it swimming in blood as brother fought brother in the worst kind of war, a civil one. The anti-war satire was carried forward in the account of the conflict between the Turks and the Russians with its attendant horrors, especially those visited upon the helpless civilians.
Voltaire did not relent in his running battle against religion and the Church. The old woman, we learn, turned out to be the illegitimate daughter of a pope. Of great interest is a note that first appeared in an 1829 edition of Candide, one that has been attributed to Voltaire himself, despite the late date of publication: "Note the author's extreme discretion! So far there has been no pope named Urban X; he is afraid to ascribe a bastard daughter to a known pope. What circumspection! What delicacy of conscience." If these are not Voltaire's words, they at least are quite Voltarian and provide a good example of his sardonic wit.
Voltaire scored a hit again, this time against warring popes who maintained armies when he described the soldiers who were expected to defend the ladies as being more cowardly than the pope's soldiers.
Yet one must not conclude that, in the realm of religious satire, Voltaire, the man reared in the Church and educated by Jesuits, attacked only Catholicism. His satire was more general when he told how the eunuch had been sent on a mission to Morocco to conclude a treaty for exterminating the trade with other Christians: people who professed to adore the Prince of Peace violently opposed each other. And it is religion in general, not merely Christianity, in which Voltaire found fatal shortcomings. This is made clear when he told how the devout Mohammedans, amid the violence of warfare, never failed to say the five prayers daily as prescribed by their faith. It is further emphasized in the account of the "pious, compassionate" holy man who persuaded the starving Janizaries to slice off one buttock from each of the ladies of the Aga's seraglio rather than to kill them: "Heaven will be pleased with you for so charitable an action."
As before, Voltaire, the man whose pronounced views did so much to prepare the way for the overthrow of the ancien régime, directed his satire also against the illogical appeal to custom and the law to justify man's inhumanity to man. With what irony did he have the fifteen-year-old girl learn that the pirates, in carrying out the indecent search of the ladies, were only following "a custom established from time immemorial among civilized nations that roam the seas"—a custom followed by the Knights of Malta. And it is the French surgeon, a man of apparent good will, who assured his patients that the sort of atrocity they had endured was common enough: it was the law of war. It will be observed that, in the reference to the Knights of Malta, Voltaire works in anti-religious satire as well.
Finally, in the last of these two chapters, the author introduced the theme of despair, one often discussed among the deists and children of the Enlightenment. Injustice, intolerance, and the avariciousness of humanity caused so much of the evil that spread throughout the world. Evil derived also from nature itself, which, to borrow the words of the Victorian Alfred Lord Tennyson, could be red in tooth and claw. Death, it would logically seem, would be embraced as a welcome relief by any intelligent person. Thus ran the argument. The old woman stated that, in the course of her trying life, she had seen a prodigious number of people who loathed their existence, but only twelve who had the courage to end it. Since the Church holds despair to be an unforgivable sin—the rejection of the religious virtue hope—one can see the extent to which Voltaire went in his rejection of orthodoxy. Nor did Christian stoicism provide an answer for him.
