Candide At first glance, 'Candide' appears to be an extremely optimistic book. The main character, Candide, goes through a series of misadventures while always keeping to his belief that this is "the best of all possible worlds." During his travels, he meets one wretched sufferer after another. Successive questioning seems to reveal that each sufferer suffers more than the previous. The fact that Candide holds to his optimistic beliefs is actually a bitter satire aimed at the religious optimism of the day. While searching for anyone that has attained happiness Candide meets people who have been stabbed, beaten, flogged, whipped, raped, eaten, robbed, etc At one point he thinks he has met a happy couple lovingly flirting with each other. Upon questioning, he realizes that the woman is actually a prostitute and must maintain appearances so as to keep her price up. The man is a poorly skilled monk who every night contemplates "smashing my head against the wall of the dormitory." Candide attempts to rationalize to himself that their positions are simply related to their extreme need for money, but he soon realizes that money only exacerbates their problems. Throughout his questings, Candide only finds two groups of people who are actually happy: the Eldoradoans a poor farm family. As you may know, Eldorado is a mystical city of wealth and opportunity conjured up by imaginative imperialists. I believe that this city served a mere symbolic purpose in this book as well. The city was nearly impossible to find, it was only through extreme luck that Candide found it. He had let the river carry him away and it happened to lead to this hidden city. A city filled with beautiful women, wealth, and food was the perfect idealistic symbolic description of happiness for Voltaire. Yet Candide eventually leaves this city, illustrating its mere symbolic function. More important than the description of happiness in this novel is the description of how it is attained. The city had been hidden since its founding and stood within a dense forest hidden behind a wall of un-scalable mountains. Yet Candide found it. How? This sacred city was found by "placing himself in the hands of Providence." Basically, he had to stop searching for happiness, and just live, and let God lead him to his goal. This leads to the poor farm family, the only real happy people in this novel. For them, happiness was found in work. As they stated, "Our work keeps us free of three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty." It is this encounter that prompts a change in Candide's searching-for-happiness ways. Throughout his searchings, two things had kept his hopes up: his love for Cunegonde and his philosophy that claimed this world to be "the best of all possible worlds." In the end, neither of these things were able to provide Candide with the happiness he sought. After longing for years and years for his lost love Cunegonde, he finally found her and no longer loved her. Not only had she lost her beauty, her personality turned sour as well. After years and years of attempting to convince himself that all was for the best, Candide finally was forced to concede that perhaps this world is not all that great. However, with these two concessions, Candide prepared himself for the only true happiness allowed in man. By seeking knowledge and love, one will only become disappointed. Love does not exist and knowledge only leads one to understand the dreadfulness and suffering of this world. As the happy farmer helped Candide to realize, only through work could one become distracted and truly live as opposed to searching for what life consists of. Through work, one is kept safe from the wrath of the outside world and the boredom of the inside world. "I'd like to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet in the Bulgar army, to be whipped and hanged in an auto-da-fe, to be dissected, to be a galley slave in short, to suffer all the miseries we've all gone through or to stay here doing nothing." Consequently, Candide renounced himself to working on his farm. "Let's work without theorizing," his philosopher friend Martin told. Thus Candide was readmitted into the earthly paradise he had first been shut out of with his lust for pleasure and knowledge. After all, "When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry about whether the mice in it are comfortable?" And if He does not worry, why should we? Instead we must live, "we must cultivate our garden." Basically, searching for happiness will only lead to a realization that happiness does not exist. Only be renouncing our questioning do we attain a sort-of happiness. Instead of non-happiness, we reach a state of happiness neutrality. That this is how Voltaire sees life reveals its extreme pessimism.