Cacambo had made arrangements for Candide and himself to sail aboard a ship commanded by a Turkish captain under orders of the Sultan Ahmed. Both prostrated themselves before his "miserable Highness." En route, Candide, in whose breast hope sprang eternal, contemplated the lot of the six kings he had met in Venice and compared their lot with his own, now that he was flying to the arms of Cunégonde. He assured Martin that Pangloss had been right: "All is well." Martin could only express his hope that the youth was right. Unlike his companion, he saw nothing extraordinary in the fact that they had dined with six dethroned rulers; such dethronements were common enough.
Candide turned to Cacambo and asked him many questions about Cunégonde. What was she doing? Was she still the peerless beauty? Had Cacambo bought her a palace in Constantinople? He was told that the lady was a lowly servant in the household of a former sovereign named Ragotsky (actually a former prince of Transylvania). Much worse, she had lost her beauty. Candide gallantly declared that, ugly or beautiful, it was his duty to love her. But how, he asked, had she been reduced to such an abject state? Did not Cacambo have vast wealth in his possession? The valet told of the ransom he had had to pay to the governor of Buenos Aires, and of the large sums that he had been forced to turn over to the pirates. He himself was a slave to the deposed sultan.
Candide consoled himself with the thought that he still had a few diamonds left and that he would be able to rescue Cunégonde. But now he wondered if his lot were not really worse than that of the six kings. He assured Martin that Pangloss would have been able to provide an answer. But Martin was convinced that there were millions far worse off than Candide and the deposed rulers.
When they arrived at Bosporus, Candide secured the freedom of Cacambo and, without waste of time, headed for the shores of the Propontis to find Cunégonde. Again there occurred one of those amazing coincidences. Two galley slaves turned out to be none other than Doctor Pangloss and the Jesuit baron, Cunégonde's brother! "Is it a dream?" asked Candide. "Is that My Lord Baron, whom I killed? Is that Doctor Pangloss, whom I saw hanged?" Then he made immediate arrangements with the Levantine captain for ransoming the two. Since they were "dogs of Christian convicts," one a baron and the other a metaphysician, the price was an exorbitant one, but Candide did not protest. He also paid the captain to take them all to the nearest port.
Candide introduced Martin and Cacambo to the baron and Pangloss. They all embraced; they all talked at once. When they reached port, Candide sold a diamond worth a hundred thousand sequins for 50,000 and immediately paid the ransom for the two former galley slaves. He sold more diamonds, and they all set out in another galley to deliver Cunégonde, now a kitchen slavey in the household of the Prince of Transylvania.
Again Candide implored the baron's pardon for having given him the great sword thrust through the body. "Let's say no more about it," said the baron, and he admitted that he had been a little too hasty himself. He then told his story. After having been cured of his wound by the brother apothecary of the Jesuit College, he was carried off by a party of Spaniards and imprisoned in Buenos Aires just after his sister left; next he was chosen to go to Constantinople and serve as almoner with the ambassador of France. A week after he had assumed his duties, he met a very attractive young page to the sultan. Since it was very hot, the two bathed together. But in Turkey it was a capital crime for a Christian to be found naked with a young Moslem. A cadi (magistrate or judge) sentenced the baron to be given one hundred lashes on the soles of his feet and condemned him to the galleys. This was unjust enough, he concluded, but why should his sister be in the kitchen of a refugee Transylvanian prince?
Next Candide turned to Pangloss and asked how it happened that he had survived. Yes, he had been hanged rather than burned because of the heavy downpour of rain. A surgeon had bought his body, took it to his home, and dissected it. No one had been worse hanged than Pangloss. The Holy Inquisition's Executor of High Operations, a sub-deacon, did burn people marvelously, but he was a rank amateur at hanging. The wet rope had slipped badly and had become knotted. And thus Pangloss was still breathing. He had cried out loudly when the doctor made an incision in his body, and the frightened man fled, convinced that he had been dissecting a devil. When the doctor's wife came running into the room, she was more frightened than her husband, over whose prone body she stumbled as she ran. "My dear," she said, "what are you thinking of, dissecting a heretic? Don't you know that the devil is always in those people?" When Pangloss heard her say that she would summon a priest quickly to exorcise him, he shuddered and cried out for them to take pity on him. Finally, the "Portuguese barber," as Pangloss called him, recovered enough courage to sew up Pangloss. Further, he found Pangloss a job as lackey to a knight of Malta who was going to Venice. But since the knight was penniless, Pangloss entered the services of a Venetian merchant and went with him to Constantinople.
One day he entered a mosque where an old iman (holy man) and a very seductive appearing young devotee were present. The girl dropped the beautiful bouquet she had placed between her uncovered breasts. The gallant Pangloss retrieved and replaced it, but took so long in doing so that the iman grew angry. Recognizing Pangloss as a Christian, he cried out for help. And, like the baron, Pangloss was taken before a magistrate and given the same sentence his fellow-sufferer had received. In the galley were four young men from Marseilles, five Neapolitan priests, and two monks who told the baron that what had happened to him was a daily occurrence. The baron and Pangloss argued about who had suffered most, the latter insisting that it was far more permissible to replace a bouquet on a woman's bosom than to be stark naked with the page of a sultan, when Candide appeared and ransomed them.
"Well, my dear Pangloss," said Candide, "when you were hanged, racked with blows, and rowing in the galleys, did you still think that all was for the best?" And the philosopher assured the youth that he was still of his first opinion, arguing that Leibnitz cannot be wrong.
En route to the house of the prince of Transylvania on the shore of the Propontis, Candide, the baron, Pangloss, Martin, and Cacambo talked at length about their adventures, reasoned on the contingent and non-contingent events of the world, argued about causes and effects, moral and physical evil, and free will and necessity. When they landed at the prince's house, they saw Cunégonde and the old woman hanging towels on a line to dry. The baron paled at the sight of his once beautiful sister. She was now dark-skinned; her eyes were blood shot; her cheeks wrinkled; her arms red and rough. No longer did she have the enticing figure he had remembered. She embraced her brother and Candide, who in turn embraced the old woman. Candide ransomed both women.
The old woman, never without a plan, suggested that they buy a small farm in the neighborhood and await a better destiny. Poor Cunégonde, who did not know that she had grown ugly, reminded Candide of his promise to marry her. "I shall never endure such baseness on her part or insolence on Candide's," exclaimed the baron. He could not bear the thought that his sister's children would be barred from the aristocracy. Although Cunégonde threw herself at his feet and wept bitter tears, he was adamant. Candide called him the maddest of madmen and reminded him of all he had done for his sister. The baron replied, "You may kill me again, but you shall not marry my sister while I am alive."
Candide really had no desire to marry Cunégonde, but the baron's arrogance and Cunégonde's pleading made him determined to do so. He consulted Pangloss, Martin, and the faithful Cacambo. Pangloss prepared a fine memoir by which he proved to his own satisfaction that the baron had no right to interfere, that she could make a morganatic marriage. Martin thought that the baron should be thrown into the sea. Cacambo decided that the baron should be returned to galleys and then be sent by the first ship to the Father General in Rome. All but Cunégonde, who had been told nothing, approved of the plan. So they had the pleasure of trapping a Jesuit and punishing a German baron for excessive pride.
