The Voltaire Collection

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Twenty of Voltaire's tales, dialogues and satires, each aimed at a different piece of received wisdom. It opens with three of the best known. In The World as It Goes, a young Scythian is dispatched by his tutor to observe the great city of Persepolis and report back on why it isn't yet destroyed by its own greed and folly, and returns with the reluctant discovery that human beings and their institutions are, on the whole, more foolish than wicked. In The Story of a Good Brahmin, Voltaire's narrator meets a wise, wealthy, devout man who envies the vacant happiness of an ignorant old woman on his own doorstep, and is left with a question Voltaire refuses to answer for him: whether it is better to think clearly and suffer, or to think nothing and be content.

The centerpiece is Micromegas, in which a being from a planet orbiting the star Sirius, eight leagues tall and several centuries into a long philosophical exile, travels with a companion from Saturn down through the solar system to a small, damp planet they can barely see. There they discover, through a microscope, a civilization of tiny creatures who have developed elaborate systems of reasoning, theology, and war — and who turn out to be us.

Around them stand the rest of the collection: Memnon, or Human Wisdom; Jeannot and Colin; Cosi-Sancta; The One-Eyed Porter; The White and the Black; Plato's Dream; The Two Consoled; The Travels of Scarmentado; The White Bull; the Letter from a Turk about Fakirs; Potpourri; the Historical Eulogy of Reason; The Ears of the Count of Chesterfield; and, at the close, The Letters of Amabed, a novel told in letters.

Written across Voltaire's career, these tales show him at his most agile: light, funny, and merciless, using distance — historical, social, or literally astronomical — to make familiar arrogance look strange again. This new translation keeps his dry, conversational voice, the instrument he trusted more than any argument.