banks of the Propontis, in the house of a prince who has very few to wash. She is at present a slave in the family of an ancient sovereign, named Ragotsky, whom the Grand Turk allows three crowns a day to maintain him in his exile; but the most melancholy circumstance of all is, that she has lost her beauty and turned horribly ugly.”
“Ugly or handsome,” said Candide, “I am a man of honour; and, as such, am obliged to love her still. But how could she possibly have been reduced to so abject a condition, when I sent five or six millions to her by you?”
“Lord bless me,” said Cacambo, “was not I obliged to give two millions to Senor Don Fernando d’Ibaraa y Figueora y Mascarenas y Lampourdos y Souza, Governor of Buenos Ayres, for liberty to take Miss Cunegund away with me? and then did not a brave fellow of a pirate very gallantly strip us of all the rest? and then did not this same pirate carry us with him to Cape Matapan, to Milo, to Nicaria, to Samos, to Petra, to the Dardanelles, to Marmora, to Scutari? Cunegund and the old woman are now servants to the prince I have told you of; and I myself am slave to the dethroned Sultan.”
“What a chain of terrible calamities!” exclaimed Candide. “But, after all, I have still some diamonds left, with which I can easily procure Cunegund’s liberty. It is a pity she is grown so very ugly.”
Then turning to Martin, “What think you, friend,” said he, “whose condition is most to be pitied, the Emperor Achmet’s, the Emperor Ivan’s, King Charles Edward’s, or mine?”
“Faith, I cannot resolve your question,” said Martin, “unless I had been in the breasts of you all.”
“Ah!” cried Candide, “was Pangloss here now, he would have known, and satisfied me at once.”
“I know not,” said Martin, “in what balance your Pangloss could have weighed the misfortunes of mankind, and have set a just estimation on their sufferings. All that I pretend to know of the matter is that there are millions of men on the earth whose conditions are an hundred times more pitiable than those of King Charles Edward, the Emperor Ivan, or Sultan Achmet.”
“Why, that may be,” answered Candide.
In a few days they reached the Bosphorus; and the first thing Candide did was to pay a high ransom for Cacambo: then, without losing time, he and his companions went on board a galley, in order to search for his Cunegund, on the banks of the Propontis, notwithstanding she was grown so ugly.
