La Place's Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l'enfant trouvé and Candide

Candide est un chef d'œuvre qui n'a pas d'histoire.¹

Critics agree that the spirit of parody in Voltaire's Candide is central to that tale's meaning.² Following André Morize, who argued as early as 1913 that numerous eighteenth-century French novels present "analogies d'intrigue, d'ensemble ou de détail" with Candide, scholars have shown how Candide "either compresses or parodies conventions common to the general romance tradition."³ William Barber thought that Candide makes more than passing reference to the picaresque genre, a view taken up by Jacques van den Heuvel and others.⁴ Philip Stewart and R.A. Francis have also examined the impact of Prévost's Cleveland on Candide.⁵

At least one scholar has suggested that Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) also directly influenced Candide. Manfred Sandmann presented the idea in 1973 that Candide's early chapters recast key details from Tom Jones.⁶ Sandmann's theory was based on several parallels that he observed in the texts. Parallels with such an exact concordance, he claimed, were unlikely to have arisen by chance.⁷ Sandmann was aware that Voltaire owned the four-volume Pierre-Antoine de La Place translation of Fielding's novel, entitled Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l'enfant trouvé (hereafter referred to as L'Enfant trouvé). Surprisingly, it did not occur to him that La Place's translation might prove highly revealing and lend support to his surmise. What may then be called a methodological oversight explains, in part at least, why Sandmann's hypothesis has never been cited, let alone seriously taken up and discussed. The case is worthy of re-examination, however, for had he scrutinized La Place's 1750 translation of Tom Jones, Sandmann would have been able to demonstrate that, because Candide consistently echoes La Place's word choices, imagery, and idiosyncratic turn of phrase, the episodic structure and narrative concatenation of Candide can be read as a direct parody of the narrative conventions evident in L'Enfant trouvé. Further, a detailed analysis of La Place's handling of Fielding's characters would have shown how anecdotes mentioned in both works link Candide's principal characters to those of L'Enfant trouvé.

Tom Jones is the story of a well-meaning, naive orphan boy, raised in a nobleman's house, but expelled from that house for wooing a young woman above his station. Published in 1749, the novel was available in French the following year in a highly personal translation by La Place (1707–93). Voltaire was characteristically aware of this new publication by early 1750. Commenting on the book's distribution he wrote: "Le livre nouvellement traduit par m. de La Place est Tom-Jones, ou l'enfant trouvé, en 4 volumes. On en est assez content. L'édition vient d'être arrêtée à cause d'un conflit de juridiction entre m. Berrier et m. Mabout, on ne sait ce qui en arrivera, mais il y a déjà 2 500 exemplaires distribués."⁸ La Place is a little-known figure, who nevertheless must be credited with contributing to the growing fashion for English literature in France during the second half of the eighteenth century.⁹ Educated by English Jesuits at St-Omer, La Place had a mastery of English reputed to be so convincing that some people said he learned it at the expense of his mother tongue.¹⁰ His first published work was a 1745 translation of Aphra Behn's New World novel Oroonoko. Interested in making a name for himself in the theatre, La Place published Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved (1682) under the title of La Venise sauvée (1746). The successful performance of that work ensured La Place's recognition in literary circles.¹¹ At first, Voltaire encouraged the younger man, intervening, for example, on his behalf when the authorities seized his Théâtre anglais (1746–49).¹² From the 1750s onward, however, as La Place increasingly assumed the role of French authority on Shakespeare, Voltaire was less kindly, and...