Le Blanc Et Le Noir

In this sly philosophical fairy tale, Voltaire asks whether we steer our own destinies or merely drift on currents we cannot see. Rustan, a young man from Candahar, loses his heart to a princess from Cachemire at a country fair and abandons everything family and convention demand to pursue her. His journey becomes a gauntlet of misfortune orchestrated by his own servants: the luminous Topaze and the shadowy Ébène, whose opposing natures embody the white and black of fate itself. As Rustan stumbles toward his beloved through a landscape of comic disasters and genuine tragedy, Voltaire dismantles the comfortable notion that virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The conclusion offers no easy consolations, only the bitter wisdom that we are often architects of our own undoing, blind to the forces pulling our strings. For readers who cherish the conte philosophique tradition, this is Voltaire at his most playful and most lacerating, wrapping profound questions about free will in the guise of an oriental romance.