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.
