Free Candide Essays: Voltaire's Depiction Of Utopia

Voltaire’s Depiction of Utopia
After discovering paradise, why would anyone leave? In Voltaire’s Candide, Candide and his valet, Cacambo, discover a land plentiful in both jewels and hospitality. This land rich with currency and camaraderie is called Eldorado. Voltaire shows that paradise may not always be what people want. This is shown by his depiction of Eldorado, Candide and Cacambo’s departure from there, and what Voltaire is communicating in the text.
Eldorado is depicted as a utopia. Candide and Cacambo discover the country by accident, and what they see amazes them. After stepping on land, they see children playing with gold, rubies, and emeralds as if they were toys. They see that the streets and buildings are both splendidly decorated with gold and jewels even in the poorest of towns. Candide and Cacambo experience great hospitality when they go to a hotel where they eat extravagancies such as, “… a boiled condor which weighed two hundred pounds, two roast monkeys of an excellent flavor … exquisite stews, delicious pastries, the whole thing served up in plates of

Candide is intent to rescue his love, Miss Cunégonde, from the governor of Buenos Aires. He requests, “… a few sheep loaded with provisions, some pebbles, and some of the mud of your country” (385), from the king of Eldorado. He knows that even a small flock of sheep laden with the pebbles and mud of Eldorado will make him the richest man in all of Europe, if not the world. He plans to use a small amount of them as payment to get Cunégonde back. The king tells Candide and Cacambo that they are foolish to leave Eldorado, but allows them to leave. He even orders the country’s best scientists to build a machine to lift the travelers over the mountains surrounding the land. The mountains are described as, “… ten thousand feet high, and steep as walls; each one is more than ten leagues across”