is best, there could have been no such thing as the fall or punishment of man."
"I humbly ask your excellency's pardon," answered Pangloss, still more politely; "for the fall of man and the curse consequent thereupon necessarily entered into the system of the best of worlds." "That is as much as to say, sir," rejoined the familiar, "you do not believe in free will." "Your excellency will be so good as to excuse me," said Pangloss, "free will is consistent with absolute necessity; for it was necessary we should be free, for in that the will—"
Pangloss was in the midst of his proposition, when the inquisitor beckoned to his attendant to help him to a glass of port wine.
CHAPTER VI.
After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-fourths of the city of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to preserve the kingdom from utter ruin than to entertain the people with an auto-da-fé,[1] it having been
- ↑ An auto-da-fé was actually to have been celebrated the very day on which the earthquake destroyed Lisbon. Everybody knows than an auto-da-fé is a general jail delivery from the prisons of the Inquisition, when the wretches condemned by that tribunal are brought to the stake, or otherwise stigmatized in public.
