Paquette Le Clerc
Paquette Le Clerc
8 min read
A character in Voltaire's Candide (1759), Paquette is a young servant who, victimized by men and by society, ends up as a prostitute in Venice. Her fate embodies Voltaire's critique of the exploitation of women and the disillusionment with Pangloss's naive optimism.
Frequently asked questions
Key Facts
- A female character in Candide, Voltaire's philosophical tale published in 1759
- A servant at Castle Thunder-ten-Tronckh, she is the origin of the chain of syphilitic infection that afflicts Pangloss
- Rediscovered by Candide in Venice, she has become a prostitute out of necessity rather than choice
- Her trajectory illustrates the vulnerability of women without resources in Ancien Régime society
- She ends up in Candide's garden in Constantinople, seeking happiness through ordinary work
Works & Achievements
A philosophical tale in which Paquette embodies Voltaire's critique of the exploitation of women and the absurdity of Leibnizian optimism. The work remains one of the most widely read in the world and is part of the French high school curriculum.
A contemporary novel about a young woman forced into prostitution by social poverty — a literary figure close to Paquette. Both characters illustrate the same impossibility for a poor woman to escape exploitation in the 18th century.
An epistolary novel that examines the place of women in society and the ideal of virtuous love. A contemporary of *Candide*, it offers a contrasting vision: where Rousseau celebrates female virtue, Voltaire denounces its structural impossibility.
The great philosophical summa of the Enlightenment, addressing the condition of women, the common people, and the critique of inequality. It forms the intellectual backdrop against which Paquette fully reveals her meaning as a figure of social criticism.
A founding text of French feminism, written as a mirror to the Declaration of 1789. It extends the Voltairean critique embodied by Paquette by demanding concrete rights for women — thirty years after *Candide*.
Anecdotes
In Candide (chapter 4), Pangloss reveals to Candide that he contracted syphilis from Paquette, who had herself received it from a Franciscan monk, who in turn had gotten it through a chain tracing all the way back to the companions of Christopher Columbus. Voltaire uses this grotesque genealogy of the disease to mock Leibniz's optimism: even Pangloss's knowledge is poisoned at its very source.
When Candide finds Paquette again in Venice in chapter 24, he believes her to be happy because she laughs and sings on the arm of Brother Giroflée. But Paquette confides her true misery to him: forced into prostitution to survive, she has never known the happiness she displays. This scene is one of the novel's most powerful on the theme of social illusion and the mask of happiness.
The name “Paquette” evokes in French the *pâquerette*, a simple and fragile daisy, a symbol of innocence — an ironic contrast deliberately chosen by Voltaire against his character’s fate. The philosopher frequently uses symbolic names in Candide: Pangloss (“all tongues” in Greek), Cunégonde, Cacambo.
At the end of the novel, Paquette joins the small community settled near Constantinople. Voltaire grants her not a romantic redemption, but a laborious and modest existence: she sews, she tends the garden. This is the same practical wisdom summed up in “we must cultivate our garden” — opposed point by point to Pangloss’s theoretical optimism.
Paquette belongs to a gallery of eighteenth-century female characters driven by poverty into prostitution, such as Manon Lescaut (Prévost, 1731). By giving her a voice to describe her own misfortune in her own words, Voltaire makes a rare literary gesture for the era: he allows a woman of the common people to bear witness to her own exploitation.
Primary Sources
Pangloss confessed that he had contracted this terrible disease from Paquette, that pretty girl who had herself received it from a learned Franciscan friar, who had gotten it from an old countess.
Candide caught sight of a fresh, pretty young girl who was singing; she held by the hand a monk who seemed very pleased with himself. "At least," said Candide to Martin, "there is a happy creature." Paquette replied: "Alas! sir, this is yet another of those miseries of the trade which you saw me engaged in."
Everywhere women are enslaved; their fate depends on the law that men have made for them — a law that is often unjust and always dictated by the stronger.
The condition of domestic service is the most precarious that exists: the servant, and especially the female servant, has neither job security, nor the protection of the law, nor any recourse against the master's arbitrary will.
This misfortune is almost always the fruit of poverty or seduction; rarely is debauchery truly voluntary in a woman of the common people.
Key Places
Paquette's place of origin in the novel, where she serves as a chambermaid and meets Pangloss. Voltaire sets the action in Westphalia (Germany) to distance his satire from France while targeting the European aristocracy as a whole.
The city where Candide encounters Paquette again in chapter 24, now working as a prostitute alongside Brother Giroflée. In the 18th century, Venice was renowned for its carnival, its permissive morals, and its thriving regulated prostitution trade.
The city on whose outskirts all the characters in *Candide* settle at the end of the novel to tend their garden. It is here that Paquette finds a quiet, industrious existence, far removed from her life of prostitution in Venice.
A city evoked in *Candide* and the real social backdrop in which thousands of poor young women lived fates similar to Paquette's. Voltaire writes for a Parisian audience that would have recognized in this character an everyday social reality.
