Candide

Voltaire learned of the fabled land of Eldorado by reading Sir Walter Raleigh's account in The Discoverie of the Large and Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, first published in 1595. If he did not read the account in English, he could have found it available in the Voyage de Francois Correal aux Indes Occidentales, Volume II (Paris, 1722). Raleigh described a fabulous country, one possessing towering mountains and immense treasures, so that the name came to be used metaphorically of any place where wealth could be acquired rapidly. In his Eldorado, also, the ruling princes were descended from the once-powerful Incas, famed for their magnificent civilization. Various travel books may well have influenced Voltaire as well. And no one who wrote of a utopia could avoid owing a debt to Sir Thomas More, the author of the first modern one. In More's work he could have found a completely happy people who, without Divine Revelation, recognized one God to whom they sang hymns of adoration but did not presume to petition when they had more than they needed to satisfy their wants — a people who considered gold and precious gems to be mere baubles for children to play with. The benign philosopher-ruler also flourished in More's utopia, wherein the well-planned cities and impressive public buildings and works bore testimony to an enlightened government. But More's account of the fabled land is remarkably circumstantial. One learns the width of streets and comparable details. Thus, like Swift in Gulliver's Travels, he secures the willing suspension of disbelief on the reader's part through verisimilitude. The landscape of Voltaire's Eldorado, like that of Milton's Hell, remains most impressive but rather indefinite most of the time — and that is another way in which a reader, for the time being, is led to accept it as believable; it is left to him to fill in the details imaginatively.