Voltaire published Candide in 1759, written in days according to one possibly apocryphal account. Candide is the illegitimate nephew of a Westphalian baron raised under the philosophical tutelage of Dr. Pangloss, who holds that this is "the best of all possible worlds", a satirical version of Leibnizian optimism. Expelled from the castle for kissing the baron's daughter Cunégonde, Candide is conscripted, flogged, nearly executed, escapes to Lisbon in time for the 1755 earthquake, watches Pangloss hanged by the Inquisition, makes his way through multiple continents and disasters, briefly visits the utopian city of Eldorado, loses a fortune, and ends up farming a small garden in Constantinople with a ragged group of survivors.
Pangloss continues to insist, throughout multiple mutilations and catastrophes including syphilis, hanging, and galley slavery, that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. This repetition is Voltaire's primary comic mechanism, but it also makes a philosophical argument: that optimism as a systematic doctrine, because it requires one to rationalize suffering rather than address it, is morally equivalent to indifference. The Lisbon earthquake, which had killed tens of thousands of people four years before the novel's publication, makes this argument in real time. The Inquisition's response, staging an auto-da-fé to appease God after the earthquake, is Voltaire's most concentrated image of institutional theodicy as obscenity.
The novel's final line, "we must cultivate our garden", has been read as everything from nihilistic resignation to practical wisdom. What Voltaire seems to mean by it, in context, is that the pursuit of metaphysical justifications for suffering is less useful than direct engagement with the immediate conditions of one's life, however modest those conditions are. This is not a triumphant conclusion; it is a deliberately deflated one, appropriate for a narrative that has destroyed most of its characters' illusions about what philosophical systems can deliver.
Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations entirely as private notes, he never intended anyone else to read them.
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