Angry Laughter

Paris, at last. The first thing the city does is make Candide sick, and the second is send him a priest after his money. Salman Rushdie reads chapter twenty-two of Candide as Voltaire with the gloves off: con men, rigged card tables, and a great actress his century threw into a lime pit because the Church would not bury her kind. Along the way Rushdie confesses the acting life he never let himself have, and names the one cameo he still mourns. It ends at a supper where Voltaire seats his real enemies, and with two words that tell you what kind of writer he is.