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It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this optimism concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the all for the best approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters, not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging, and exile, Voltaire knew personally what suffering entailed. In Candide he whisks his young hero and friends through a ludicrous variety of tortures, tragedies, and a reversal of fortune, in the company of Pangloss, a metaphysico-theologo-comolo-nigologist of unflinching optimism. The result is one of the glories of eighteenth-century satire.
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