I was surprised while reading Zadig to discover that it promotes the very facile Providential worldview that Voltaire would later satirize in Candide. If you ever wondered what Candide might have been like had it been set not in the war-ravaged 18th-c. Atlantic world but in a gauzy Oriental fairyland, and if instead of a dopey optimist and a beautiful golddigger its protagonists had been two faceless paragons of wisdom and virtue who get to live happily ever after, here's your answer. ( )