Candide will have remembered, the commander continued, that he was very pretty. As a result of his physical endowments, the Superior had become very fond of him. He was made a novice and later sent to Rome. Ultimately he was among the young German Catholic recruits to be sent to Paraguay. In the new country, his advancement was rapid. He became a sub-deacon and a lieutenant and finally a colonel and a priest. The Spanish troops, he assured Candide, would be soundly beaten and excommunicated.
The baron never tired of embracing Candide, whom he called his brother and savior. Perhaps, he said, they could enter Buenos Aires as conquerors and be reunited with Cunégonde. Nothing would have pleased Candide more, and he then revealed the fact that he expected to marry the baron's sister. Now the baron, who had been so effusive toward Candide, became enraged, and he denounced the hapless youth as an insolent wretch. How could Candide have had the impudence to marry his sister with seventy-two divisions on her coat-of-arms! The petrified young man endeavored to reason with the Jesuit baron, telling how he had rescued her from a Jew and the Grand Inquisitor and adding that Doctor Pangloss had always told him that men are equal. He concluded firmly that he intended to marry Cunégonde.
The baron could not restrain himself. He struck Candide on the face with the flat of his sword, and the youth, drawing his own weapon, paid back the blow with a thrust to the hilt into the Jesuit's body. Appalled that he again had been placed in a position where he was impelled to perform a violent act, Candide bewailed his lot: he, the kindest man in the world, had now killed three men, two of them priests.
