A young man raised to believe this is the best of all possible worlds is thrown out of the castle and spends the book being flogged, shipwrecked, robbed and nearly eaten across three continents to test the theory. Voltaire wrote it in three days, published it under a false name in five cities at once, and denied authorship for the rest of his life. It was banned almost everywhere and never out of print. Zadig, written a decade earlier, sends a Babylonian sage through the same test of fortune by a gentler road, and invents the art of deduction on the way. Ninety-seven plates after Watteau and Lancret follow the marching, resting and ruined troops of the age, the painterly counterpart to the disasters Voltaire's travellers keep surviving.
