But it was a deeper and a more solemn emotion, and doubtless some dreadful vision, that had caused Mme. de Dey’s death; for at the very hour when she died at Carentan, her son was shot in le Morbihan.

* * * * *

This tragical story may be added to all the instances on record of the workings of sympathies uncontrolled by the laws of time and space.  These observations, collected with scientific curiosity by a few isolated individuals, will one day serve as documents on which to base the foundations of a new science which hitherto has lacked its man of genius.

Introduction to Zadig the Babylonian

    A work (says the author) which performs more than it promises.

Voltaire never heard of a “detective story”; and yet he wrote the first in modern literature, so clever as to be a model for all the others that followed.

He describes his hero Zadig thus:  “His chief talent consisted in discovering the truth,”—­in making swift, yet marvelous deductions, worthy of Sherlock Holmes or any other of the ingenious modern “thinking machines.”

But no one would be more surprised than Voltaire to behold the part that Zadig now “performs.”  The amusing Babylonian, now regarded as the aristocratic ancestor of modern story-detectives, was created as a chief mocker in a satire on eighteenth-century manners, morals, and metaphysics.

Voltaire breathed his dazzling brilliance into “Zadig” as he did into a hundred other characters—­for a political purpose.  Their veiled and bitter satire was to make Europe think—­to sting reason into action—­to ridicule out of existence a humbugging System of special privileges.  It did, via the French Revolution and the resulting upheavals.  His prose romances are the most perfect of Voltaire’s manifold expressions to this end, which mark him the most powerful literary man of the century.

But the arch-wit of his age outdid his brilliant self in “Zadig.”  So surpassingly sharp and quick was this finished sleuth that his methods far outlived his satirical mission.  His razor-mind was reincarnated a century later as the fascinator of nations—­M.  Dupin.  And from Poe’s wizard up to Sherlock Holmes, no one of the thousand “detectives,” drawn in a myriad scenes that thrill the world of readers, but owes his outlines, at least, to “Zadig.”

“Don’t use your reason—­act like your friends—­respect conventionalities —­otherwise the world will absolutely refuse to let you be happy.”  This sums up the theory of life that Zadig satires.  His comical troubles proceed entirely from his use of independent reason as opposed to the customs of his times.

The satire fitted ancient Babylonia—­it fitted eighteenth-century France—­and perhaps the reader of these volumes can find some points of contact with his own surroundings.

It is still piquant, however, to remember Zadig’s original raison d’etre.  He happened to be cast in the part of what we now know as “a detective,” merely because Voltaire had been reading stories in the “Arabian Nights” whose heroes get out of scrapes by marvelous deductions from simple signs. (See Vol.  VI.)