“Pardon,” said Candide to the Baron; “once more let me entreat your
pardon, Reverend Father, for running you through the body.”

“Say no more about it,” replied the Baron. “I was a little too hasty
I must own; but as you seem to be desirous to know by what accident
I came to be a slave on board the galley where you saw me, I will
inform you. After I had been cured of the wound you gave me, by the
College apothecary, I was attacked and carried off by a party of
Spanish troops, who clapped me in prison in Buenos Ayres, at the
very time my sister was setting out from there. I asked leave to
return to Rome, to the general of my Order, who appointed me
chaplain to the French Ambassador at Constantinople. I had not been
a week in my new office, when I happened to meet one evening a young
Icoglan, extremely handsome and well-made. The weather was very hot;
the young man had an inclination to bathe. I took the opportunity to
bathe likewise. I did not know it was a crime for a Christian to be
found naked in company with a young Turk. A cadi ordered me to receive
a hundred blows on the soles of my feet, and sent me to the galleys. I
do not believe that there was ever an act of more flagrant
injustice. But I would fain know how my sister came to be a scullion
to a Transylvanian prince, who has taken refuge among the Turks?”

“But how happens it that I behold you again, my dear Pangloss?” said
Candide.

“It is true,” answered Pangloss, “you saw me hanged, though I
ought properly to have been burned; but you may remember, that it
rained extremely hard when they were going to roast me. The storm
was so violent that they found it impossible to light the fire; so
they hanged me because they could do no better. A surgeon purchased my
body, carried it home, and prepared to dissect me. He began by
making a crucial incision from my navel to the clavicle. It is
impossible for anyone to have been more lamely hanged than I had been.
The executioner was a subdeacon, and knew how to burn people very
well, but as for hanging, he was a novice at it, being quite out of
practice; the cord being wet, and not slipping properly, the noose did
not join. In short, I still continued to breathe; the crucial incision
made me scream to such a degree, that my surgeon fell flat upon his
back; and imagining it was the Devil he was dissecting, ran away,
and in his fright tumbled down stairs. His wife hearing the noise,
flew from the next room, and seeing me stretched upon the table with
my crucial incision, was still more terrified than her husband, and
fell upon him. When they had a little recovered themselves, I heard
her say to her husband, ‘My dear, how could you think of dissecting
a heretic? Don’t you know that the Devil is always in them? I’ll run
directly to a priest to come and drive the evil spirit out.’ I
trembled from head to foot at hearing her talk in this manner, and
exerted what little strength I had left to cry out, ‘Have mercy on
me!’ At length the Portuguese barber took courage, sewed up my
wound, and his wife nursed me; and I was upon my legs in a fortnight’s
time. The barber got me a place to be lackey to a Knight of Malta, who
was going to Venice; but finding my master had no money to pay me my
wages, I entered into the service of a Venetian merchant and went with
him to Constantinople.

“One day I happened to enter a mosque, where I saw no one but an old
man and a very pretty young female devotee, who was telling her beads;
her neck was quite bare, and in her bosom she had a beautiful
nosegay of tulips, roses, anemones, ranunculuses, hyacinths, and
auriculas; she let fall her nosegay. I ran immediately to take it
up, and presented it to her with a most respectful bow. I was so
long in delivering it that the man began to be angry; and,
perceiving I was a Christian, he cried out for help; they carried me
before the cadi, who ordered me to receive one hundred bastinadoes,
and sent me to the galleys. I was chained in the very galley and to
the very same bench with the Baron. On board this galley there were
four young men belonging to Marseilles, five Neapolitan priests, and
two monks of Corfu, who told us that the like adventures happened
every day. The Baron pretended that he had been worse used than
myself; and I insisted that there was far less harm in taking up a
nosegay, and putting it into a woman’s bosom, than to be found stark
naked with a young Icoglan. We were continually whipped, and
received twenty lashes a day with a heavy thong, when the
concatenation of sublunary events brought you on board our galley to
ransom us from slavery.”

“Well, my dear Pangloss,” said Candide to him, “when You were
hanged, dissected, whipped, and tugging at the oar, did you continue
to think that everything in this world happens for the best?”

“I have always abided by my first opinion,” answered Pangloss; “for,
after all, I am a philosopher, and it would not become me to retract
my sentiments; especially as Leibnitz could not be in the wrong: and
that preestablished harmony is the finest thing in the world, as
well as a plenum and the materia subtilis.”