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La Place, Monbron, and the Origins of Candide

It has recently been argued that Candide was significantly influenced by Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, through the French adaptation of that work published by Pierre-Antoine de La Place in 1750 under the title L’Enfant trouvé. Candide, Cunégonde, and Pangloss can plausibly be seen to have evolved, respectively, from Tom Jones, Sophia Western, and the philosopher Square, as depicted by La Place. Voltaire was also inspired by the general structure of L’Enfant trouvé and took up and adapted parts of that novel’s plot, starting with Tom’s childhood paradise in Somerset and ending with the masked ball in London where he desperately searches for his beloved Sophia. It seems reasonable to assume that in writing Candide Voltaire consciously challenges Fielding’s faith in ‘the controlling hand of Providence’, illustrated by Tom Jones’s astonishing deus ex machina happy ending. In his 1913 edition of the tale André Morize opined that Candide may have been partly inspired by the cynical memoirs of Fougeret de Monbron (1706–1760). The present essay argues that these two narratives cross-fertilized in Voltaire’s mind, contributing in important ways to the characters that Candide portrays, to the narrative that binds those characters together, and to the language in which the whole is expressed.