ed.

He describes his hero Zadig thus: "His chief talent consisted in
discovering the truth,"--in making swift, yet marvelous deductions,
worthy of Sherlock Holmes or any other of the ingenious modern
"thinking machines."

But no one would be more surprised than Voltaire to behold the part
that Zadig now "performs." The amusing Babylonian, now regarded as the
aristocratic ancestor of modern story-detectives, was created as a
chief mocker in a satire on eighteenth-century manners, morals, and
metaphysics.

Voltaire breathed his dazzling brilliance into "Zadig" as he did into a
hundred other characters--for a political purpose. Their veiled and
bitter satire was to make Europe think--to sting reason into action--to
ridicule out of existence a humbugging System of special privileges. It
did, _via_ the French Revolution and the resulting upheavals. His prose
romances are the most perfect of Voltaire's manifold expressions to
this end, which mark him the most powerful literary man of the century.

But the arch-wit of his age outdid his brilliant self in "Zadig." So
surpassingly sharp and quick was this finished sleuth that his methods
far outlived his satirical mission. His razor-mind was reincarnated a
century later as the fascinator of nations--M. Dupin. And from Poe's
wizard up to Sherlock Holmes, no one of the thousand "detectives,"
drawn in a myriad scenes that thrill the world of readers, but owes his
outlines, at least, to "Zadig."

"Don't use your reason--act like your friends--respect conventionalities
--otherwise the world will absolutely refuse to let you be happy." This
sums up the theory of life that Zadig satires. His comical troubles
proceed entirely from his use of independent reason as opposed to the
customs of his times.

The satire fitted ancient Babylonia--it fitted eighteenth-century
France--and perhaps the reader of these volumes can find some points of
contact with his own surroundings.

It is still piquant, however, to remember Zadig's original _raison
d'etre_. He happened to be cast in the part of what we now know as "a
detective," merely because Voltaire had been reading stories in the
"Arabian Nights" whose heroes get out of scrapes by marvelous
deductions from simple signs. (See Vol. VI.)

Voltaire must have grinned at the delicious human interest, the subtle
irony to pierce complacent humbugs, that lurked behind these Oriental
situations. He made the most of his chance for a quaint para