His first step in this direction was to appear in the small role of Proculus in Voltaire's Brutus, with a toga and short Roman haircut, much to the surprise of an audience accustomed to 18th century costume on stage, regardless of whether it suited the part played.

This story is best known through Voltaire's two accounts, which, however, were polemic and not history, and in fact contradict each other.

When finally the two bedraggled men reach their friend's home, Voltaire's fears are once again aroused.

He tells them that that they class themselves with Voltaire because of their wit, but they have none of Voltaire's compassion.

In Voltaire's satire Candide, the main characters stop there on their escape from Lisbon ( chapter 9-10 ).

It was followed by Turk and no Turk ( 1785 ), a musical comedy ; Inkle and Yarico ( 1787 ), an opera ; Ways and Means ( 1788 ); The Iron Chest ( 1796 ), taken from William Godwin's Adventures of Caleb Williams ; The Poor Gentleman ( 1802 ); John Bull, or an Englishman's Fireside ( 1803 ), his most successful piece ; The Heir at Law ( 1808 ), which enriched the stage with one immortal character, " Dr Pangloss " ( borrowed of course from Voltaire's Candide ), and numerous other pieces, many of them adapted from the French.

Relying on Voltaire's account, Gustave Flaubert put a memorable speech into the mouth of the alleged deity Crepitus in The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

A passage in Voltaire's Candide has the book's eponymous main character meet the deposed Ahmed III while on a ship from Venice to Constantinople.

In chapter three of Voltaire's 1747 novel Zadig there is an adaptation of The Three Princes of Serendip, this time involving, instead of a camel, a horse and a dog, which Zadig was able to describe in great detail from his observations of the tracks on the

Although most early-19th-century historians tended to follow Voltaire's lead in bestowing extravagant praise on the warrior-king, others have criticized him as a fanatic, a bully, and a bloodthirsty warmonger.

The most famous example is Voltaire's Zadig ( 1748 ), an attack on religious bigotry set against a vague pre-Islamic Middle Eastern background.

In the middle of the 19th century, a revival of interest in choral music swept France, and Saint-Saëns, an admirer of the oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, made plans to compose an oratorio on the subject of Samson and Delilah as suggested by Voltaire's libretto Samson for Rameau.

Following the success of The Lark, Hellman conceived of another play with incidental music, based on Voltaire's Candide.

Voltaire's story ( in his Letters on the English Nation ) that Her Grace used to go to Wycherley's chambers in the Temple disguised as a country wench, in a straw hat, with pattens on and a basket in her hand, may be apocryphal, for disguise was superfluous in her case, but it shows how general was the opinion that, under such patronage as this, Wycherley's fortune as poet and dramatist was now made.

Pierre Bayle attributed to Bodin a maxim about the intellectual consequences of the non-existence of God ( a precursor of Voltaire's, but based on a traditional commonplace of French thinkers ).

When, after Voltaire's death, La Harpe in his praise of the philosopher ventured on some reasonable, but rather ill-timed, criticism of individual works, he was accused of treachery to one who had been his constant friend.

In consequence of his History of Louis XI, he was appointed historiographer of France, when that place became vacant on Voltaire's retirement to Prussia.

The term " panglossianism " describes baseless optimism of the sort exemplified by the beliefs of Pangloss from Voltaire's Candide, which are the opposite of his fellow traveller Martin's pessimism and emphasis on free will.

* Dialogue from the film is sampled in the track " Project80 " on Cabaret Voltaire's 1994 album The Conversation.

The libretto by Gaetano Rossi is based on Voltaire's tragedy Semiramis, which in turn was based on the legend of Semiramis of Babylon.

His predilection for the stage was cultivated in amateur theatricals, and on 21 November 1787 he made his debut at the Comédie-Française as Seide in Voltaire's Mahomet.

According to Arnold Ages, Voltaire's " Lettres philosophiques, Dictionnaire philosophique, and Candide, to name but a few of his better known works, are saturated with comments on Jews and Judaism and the vast majority are negative ".

In an opposite direction, he premiered a technologically innovative opera called Dennis Cleveland at the Kitchen in 1996, based on a talk show format and with some of the singers / actors spread out among the audience, though with a dense libretto drawn from John Ralston Saul's critique of Western society in the latter's book Voltaire's Bastards.

The more radical Swinney's Birmingham Chronicle, which caused controversy in 1771 by serialising Voltaire's Thoughts on Religion, boasted in 1776 that it circulated across nine counties and was " filed by coffeehouses in practically every centre of any size from Edinburgh southwards ".

Jean-François Lefevre de la Barre ( September 12, 1745 – July 1, 1766 ) was a French nobleman, famous for having been tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with Voltaire's " Philosophical Dictionary ".

Voltaire's efforts were successful, and in 1765 the unfortunate Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated on all charges.

In his Voltaire, A Life ( pp. 427 – 31 ), Ian Davidson describes events on Voltaire's estate at Ferney, north of Geneva, in the 1770s.

The " ceremony of e-fumi, of trampling on images, was well enough reported in Europe already by the early eighteenth century to have left a mark on works of imaginative literature like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World, and Voltaire's Candide ," according to Prof. Michael North in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400-1900.

Voltaire's work seems to be prophetic in nature because the story was published just fifteen years before the French Revolution, when be-headings were prudent.

As philosophers of Voltaire's day contended with the problem of evil, so too does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously.

Inspired by Voltaire's sense of the breadth of history, Hume widened the focus of history, away from merely Kings, Parliaments, and armies, to literature and science as well.

One of the earliest examples of detective fiction is Voltaire's Zadig ( 1748 ), which features a main character who performs feats of analysis.

* Early Deism in France: From the so-called ' deistes ' of Lyon ( 1564 ) to Voltaire's ' Lettres philosophiques ' ( 1734 ) by C. J. Betts ( Martinus Nijhoff, 1984 )

A year later, Voltaire's old friends began a campaign to have his body buried in the Panthéon, as church property had been confiscated by the French Government.

* Voltaire's novel Candide purports to be assembled from the notes of a deceased " Monsieur le docteur Ralph ", likely because the novel pokes fun at most of the powers of Europe at the time.

The libretto for Tancredi was an arrangement by Gaetano Rossi of Voltaire's tragedy Tancrède.

Euler had limited training in rhetoric, and tended to debate matters that he knew little about, making him a frequent target of Voltaire's wit.

In Voltaire's Candide, Dr. Pangloss is portrayed as a clueless scholar who, despite the evidence, says that " all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Voltaire's popular novel Candide mocked Leibnizian optimism through the fictional tale of a naive youth.

Voltaire's caustic response to Leibniz ' doctrine that this is the best possible world.

Paine would also more than likely have been familiar with Voltaire's mocking wit and the works of other deistic French philosophes.

Samuel Butler's Erewhon can be seen as a dystopia because of the way sick people are punished as criminals while thieves are cured in hospitals, which the inhabitants of Erewhon see as natural and right, i. e. utopian ( as mocked in Voltaire's Candide ).

Numan also provided narration for Voltaire's short film Odokuro in 2011.

Among the books accompanying him as he traveled were, Adam Smith's " The Wealth of Nations ", Voltaire's " Letters ", and when he wrote the Bolivian Constitution, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws.

Voltaire's French novel Candide ( 1759 ) contains elements of the picaresque.

Voltaire's Micromégas ( 1752 ) includes two aliens, from Saturn and Sirius, who are of immense size and visit the Earth out of curiosity.