The Women in the Book

An old woman appears out of nowhere in Lisbon, heals Candide's wounds, and tells him to come with her and ask no questions. He goes. Salman Rushdie wants to know why we trust her on sight, and his answer starts in his own grandmother's house in India. This episode follows the women of Voltaire's Candide: the old woman nobody fears and everybody obeys, Cunégonde and the story she tells about her own virtue, a story Rushdie reads with one eyebrow up, and Paquette, the girl from the castle, found again in Venice. No one in the book suffers more. What Voltaire thinks of them is the surprise.