Monkeys

The Monkeys in this episode become the center of a sharp reversal: Candide kills them while believing the two young women they pursue need rescuing, only to discover from the women’s grief that the animals were their beloved companions. The encounter unsettles his assumptions about animal nature and turns an apparent act of rescue into a fatal mistake.

Setting and Encounter

Candide and Cacambo encounter the Monkeys in an unknown country, after riding beyond the camp where the death of the Jesuit Baron has not yet become known. As the sun goes down, the travelers hear cries they cannot identify as expressions of pain or joy. They find two young women running across a meadow with two Monkeys after them. The scene is presented first through the travelers’ uncertainty, leaving Candide to interpret what he sees before he understands the relationship among the four figures.

Candide’s Mistaken Rescue

Candide takes the Monkeys’ pursuit as a threat to the women. Confident in his shooting, a skill acquired during service in the Bulgarian army, he fires his double-barrelled Spanish gun and kills both animals. He regards the act as a rescue and imagines the women may be of high rank, perhaps bringing him advantages in the country. His immediate interpretation gives the shooting a moral justification, but it rests on an assumption about the Monkeys’ intentions rather than knowledge of their bond with the women.

The Reversal and the Monkeys’ Relationship

That assumption collapses when the women embrace the dead Monkeys and mourn them. Cacambo explains that the animals were the women’s sweethearts. Their response reveals an attachment Candide had not recognized: what looked to him like a rescue has destroyed the women’s companions. The episode’s shift from apparent danger to bereavement depends on the visible contrast between Candide’s confident explanation of his deed and the women’s grief.

Cacambo also describes the Monkeys as partly human, comparing their mixed nature to his own partial Spanish identity. Candide connects the claim to what Pangloss had taught about unions between humans and animals producing creatures such as centaurs, fauns, and satyrs, and admits that he had treated such accounts as fables. Cacambo presents the encounter as evidence that those stories may be true, while also warning that people without proper education may make use of such creatures and that the women could retaliate against the travelers.

Narrative Significance

The Monkeys’ brief appearance exposes the limits of judging unfamiliar beings from a single outward action. Candide’s intervention follows quickly from pity, but his certainty about what he sees is misplaced; the women’s mourning supplies the relationship his first reading missed. By making the Monkeys both the apparent pursuers and the women’s beloveds, the episode turns an uncomplicated rescue into an irony about ignorance, violence, and the danger of treating human categories as settled facts.