When Baron Thunder-ten-trockh catches his daughter Cunegonde beginning to replicate this experiment in cause-and-effect with Candide, the young lad is unceremoniously kicked out of the castle, tutor included, and so begins one of literature's most famous and bizarre journeys.

Candide - young, innocent and guileless - and his tutor, the good and blindly optimistic Dr Pangloss (his specialty is "metaphysico-the-ologo-cosmolo-nigology"), suffer all manner of horrible disasters, including burning at the stake and polite society itself, in search of first-hand answers to life's perennial mysteries.

A champion of the Enlightenment, and one of France's greatest cynics and literary satirists, Voltaire (1694-1778) was always quick to attack tyranny, bigotry, intolerance, persecution and prejudice wherever they reared their ugly heads. One of his favorite weapons was the "philosophic story," of which the comic and satiric novel Candide was his most famous, and justifiably his finest.