Micromégas is an imitation of Swift, but perhaps richer than its model in cosmic imagination. The earth is visited by an inhabitant from Sirius; he is some 500,000 feet tall, as befits the citizen of so large a star. On his way through space he has picked up a gentleman from Saturn, who grieves because he is only a few thousand feet in height. As they walk through the Mediterranean the Sirian wets his heels. He asks his comrade how many senses the Saturnians have and is told: “We have seventy-two, but we are daily complaining of the smaller number.” “To what age do you commonly live?” “Alas, a mere trifle; . . . very few on our globe survive 15,000 years. So you see that in a manner we begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom. Scarce do we begin to learn a little when death intervenes before we can profit by experience.”26 As they stand in the sea they take up a ship as one might pick up some animalcule, and the Sirian poises it on his thumb-nail, causing much commotion among the human passengers. “The chaplains of the ship repeated exorcisms, the sailors swore, and the philosophers formed a system” to explain this disturbance of the laws of gravity. The Sirian bends down like a darkening cloud and addresses them:
“O ye intelligent atoms, in whom the Supreme Being hath been pleased to manifest his omniscience and power, without doubt your joys on this earth must be pure and exquisite; for being unencumbered with matter, and—to all appearance—little else than soul, you must spend your lives in the delights of pleasure and reflection, which are the true enjoyments of a perfect spirit. True happiness I have nowhere found; but certainly here it dwells.”
“We have matter enough,” answered one of the philosophers, “to do abundance of mischief . . . . You must know, for example, that at this very moment, while I am speaking, there are 100,000 animals of our own species, covered with hats, slaying an equal number of their fellow-creatures, who wear turbans; at least they are either slaying or being slain; and this has usually been the case all over the earth from time immemorial.”
“Miscreants!” cried the indignant Sirian; “I have a good mind to take two or three steps, and trample the whole nest of such ridiculous assassins under my feet.”
“Don’t give yourself the trouble,” replied the philosopher; “they are industrious enough in securing their own destruction. At the end of ten years the hundredth part of these wretches will not survive . . . . Besides, the punishment should not be inflicted upon them, but upon those sedentary and slothful barbarians who, from their palaces, give orders for murdering a million of men, and then solemnly thank God for their success.”27
Next to Candide, which belongs to a later period of Voltaire’s life, the best of these tales is Zadig. Zadig was a Babylonian philosopher, “as wise as it is possible for men to be; . . . he knew as much of metaphysics as hath ever been known in any age,—that is, little or nothing at all.” “Jealousy made him imagine that he was in love with Semira.” In defending her against robbers he was wounded in the left eye.
A messenger was despatched to Memphis for the great Egyptian physician Hermes, who came with a numerous retinue. He visited Zadig, and declared that the patient would lose his eye. He even foretold the day and hour when this fatal event would happen. “Had it been the right eye,” said he, “I could easily have cured it; but the wounds of the left eye are incurable.” All Babylon lamented the fate of Zadig, and admired the profound knowledge of Hermes. In two days the abscess broke of its own accord, and Zadig was perfectly cured. Hermes wrote a book to prove that it ought not to have healed. Zadig did not read it.28
He hurried, instead, to Semira, only to find that upon hearing Hermes’ first report she had betrothed herself to another man, having, she said, “an unconquerable aversion to one-eyed men.” Zadig thereupon married a peasant woman, hoping to find in her the virtues which had been missing in the court lady Semira. To make sure of the fidelity of his wife, he arranged with a friend that he, Zadig, should pretend to die, and that the friend should make love to the wife an hour later. So Zadig had himself pronounced dead, and lay in the coffin while his friend first commiserated and then congratulated the widow, and at last proposed immediate marriage to her. She made a brief resistance; and then, “protesting she would ne’er consent, consented.” Zadig rose from the dead and fled into the woods to console himself with the beauty of nature.
Having become a very wise man, he was made vizier to the king, to whose realm he brought prosperity, justice, and peace. But the queen fell in love with him; and the king, perceiving it, “began to be troubled . . . . He particularly remarked that the queen’s shoes were blue, and that Zadig’s shoes were blue; that his wife’s ribbons were yellow, and that Zadig’s bonnet was yellow.” He resolved to poison them both; but the queen discovered the plot, and sent a note to Zadig: “Fly, I conjure thee, by our mutual love and our yellow ribbon!” Zadig again fled into the woods.
He then represented to himself the human species, as it really is, as a parcel of insects devouring one another on a little atom of clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own being and that of Babylon. His soul launched into infinity; and detached from the senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when, afterwards, returning to himself, . . . he considered that the Queen had perhaps died for him, the universe vanished from sight.
Passing out of Babylon he saw a man cruelly beating a woman; he responded to her cries for help, fought the man, and at last, to save himself, struck a blow which killed his enemy. Thereupon he turned to the lady and asked, “What further, madam, wouldst thou have me do for thee?” “Die, villain! for thou hast killed my lover. Oh, that I were able to tear out thy heart!”
Zadig was shortly afterward captured and enslaved; but he taught his master philosophy, and became his trusted counsellor. Through his advice the practice of suttee (by which a widow had herself buried with her husband) was abolished by a law which required that before such martyrdom the widow should spend an hour alone with a handsome man. Sent on a mission to the King of Serendib, Zadig taught him that an honest minister could best be found by choosing the lightest dancer among the applicants: he had the vestibule of the dance hall filled with loose valuables, easily stolen, and arranged that each candidate should pass through the vestibule alone and unwatched; when they had all entered, they were asked to dance. “Never had dancers performed more unwillingly or with less grace. Their heads were down, their backs bent, their hands pressed to their sides.”—And so the story rushes on. We can imagine those evenings at Cirey!