Happily Zadig is in the position of a great many other philosophers. What he was like when he was in the flesh, indeed whether he existed at all, are matters of no great consequence. What we care about in a light is that it shows the way, not whether it is lamp or candle, tallow or wax. Our only real interest in Zadig lies in the conceptions of which he is the putative father; and his biographer has stated these with so much clearness and vivacious illustration, that we need hardly feel a pang, even if critical research should prove King Moabdar and all the rest of the story to be unhistorical, and reduce Zadig himself to the shadowy condition of a solar myth.
Voltaire tells us that, disenchanted with life by sundry domestic misadventures, Zadig withdrew from the turmoil of Babylon to a secluded retreat on the banks of the Euphrates, where he beguiled his solitude by the study of nature. The manifold wonders of the world of life had a particular attraction for the lonely student; incessant and patient observation of the plants and animals about him sharpened his naturally good powers of observation and of reasoning; until, at length, he acquired a sagacity which enabled him to perceive endless minute differences among objects which, to the untutored eye, appeared absolutely alike.
It might have been expected that this enlargement of the powers of the mind and of its store of natural knowledge could tend to nothing but the increase of a man’s own welfare and the good of his fellow-men. But Zadig was fated to experience the vanity of such expectations.
One day, walking near a little wood, he saw, hastening that way, one of the Queen’s chief eunuchs, followed by a troop of officials, who appeared to be in the greatest anxiety, running hither and thither like men distraught, in search of some lost treasure.
“Young man,” cried the eunuch, “have you seen the Queen’s dog?” Zadig answered modestly, “A bitch, I think, not a dog.” “Quite right,” replied the eunuch; and Zadig continued, “A very small spaniel who has lately had puppies; she limps with the left foreleg, and has very long ears.” “Ah! you have seen her then,” said the breathless eunuch. “No,” answered Zadig, “I have not seen her; and I really was not aware that the Queen possessed a spaniel.”
By an odd coincidence, at the very same time, the handsomest horse in the King’s stables broke away from his groom in the Babylonian plains. The grand huntsman and all his staff were seeking the horse with as much anxiety as the eunuch and his people the spaniel; and the grand huntsman asked Zadig if he had not seen the King’s horse go that way.
“A first-rate galloper, small-hoofed, five feet high; tail three feet and a half long; cheek pieces of the bit of twenty-three carat gold; shoes silver?” said Zadig.
“Which way did he go? Where is he?” cried the grand huntsman.
“I have not seen anything of the horse, and I never heard of him before,” replied Zadig.
The grand huntsman and the chief eunuch made sure that Zadig had stolen both the King’s horse and the Queen’s spaniel, so they haled him before the High Court of Desterham, which at once condemned him to the knout, and transportation for life to Siberia. But the sentence was hardly pronounced when the lost horse and spaniel were found. So the judges were under the painful necessity of reconsidering their decision: but they fined Zadig four hundred ounces of gold for saying he had seen that which he had not seen.