candide study guide

English 1. Candide review for the final exam.
If you can answer these questions, you will be in good shape for the final. Questions on
the exam will follow everybody’s favorite “identify the speaker” format, and will require
you to recall the speaker’s name from memory. This means you must be able to recall
such names as Cunegonde, Pococurante, Cacambo, Martin, Pangloss, Candide, of course,
James the Anabaptist, and anybody else who may be identified below, from memory.
Obviously characters that are identified only as “the old woman” may be identified as
“the old woman.” There will be no word bank.
Before you begin, re-read the section on the Enlightenment in pages 818-820 of your text.
What Enlightenment elements are evident in Candide? Be able to provide examples.
Identify the speaker:
1. Twice a year we get a pair of linen drawers to wear. If we catch a finger in the
sugar mills where we work, they cut off our hand; if we try to run away, they cut
off our leg. I have undergone both these experiences. This is the price of the
sugar you eat in Europe.
2. All this is for the best, since if there is a volcano at Lisbon, it cannot be
somewhere else, since it is unthinkable that things should not be where they are,
since everything is well.
3. Well, my dear ________, now that you have been hanged, dissected, beaten to a
pulp, and sentenced to the galleys, do you still think everything is for the best in
this world.
4. I am still of my first opinion, replied ________, for after all I am a philosopher,
and it would not be right for me to recant since Leibniz could not possibly be
wrong, and besides pre-established harmony is the finest notion in the world. . . .
5. What does it matter . . . whether there’s good or evil? When his highness sends a
ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?
6. I am the best man in the world, and here are three men I’ve killed already, and
two of the three were priests!
7. That’s true enough . . . but we must go and work in the garden.

8. Do you believe, said __________________ that men have always massacred one
another as they do today? That they have always been liars, traitors, ingrates,
thieves, weaklings, sneaks, cowards, backbiters, gluttons, drunkards misers,
climbers, killers, calumnators, sensualists, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?
9. Do you believe, said __________________ that hawks have always eaten pigeons
when they could get them?
10. He’s no special delight of mine. I was once made to believe that I took pleasure
in reading him; but that constant recital of fights which are all alike, those gods
who are always interfering but never decisively, that Helen who is the cause of
the war and then scarcely takes any part in the story, that Troy which is always
under siege and never taken—all that bores me to tears.
11. How is Pangloss employed when he and Candide are reunited?
12. Where is this spoken?
--My friends, we are all priests; the king and all the heads of household sing formal
psalms of thanksgiving every morning, and five or six thousand voices accompany them.
--What! You have no monks to teach, argue, govern, intrigue, and burn at the stake
everyone who disagrees with them?
13. How does Pangloss get in trouble with the Inquisition?
a. He steps on a crucifix
b. He’s friends with an Anabaptist
c. His views on original sin are suspect
14. Who winds up “remarkably ugly” in the end?
15. Who is “the daughter of Pope Urban the Tenth and the Princess of Palestrina”
whose fiancé is poisoned by his former mistress and who is carried off into
slavery in Morocco with her mother, and who has one buttock removed to feed a
contingent of janizaries?
16. In what city does Candide meet a lot of people who are after his money, attend a
play, encounter many critics, and enjoy a dinner that is “first silence, then an
indistinguishable rush of words, then jokes, mostly insipid, false news, bad logic,
a little politics, a great deal of malice”?