So there's this chap, erm ... *checks notes* ... Candide. A minor relative of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, living happily as a minor member of the household at their castle in Westphalia until he contrives to piss on his Spätzle by getting a little too friendly with the Baron's winsome daughter Cunégonde. Before she can get fully acquainted with his Bratwurst the Baron rumbles them and banishes Candide from the castle.
Candide immediately falls into the first of a series of adventures when he is press-ganged into army service, flogged and forced to fight. Escaping amid the carnage of battle, he makes his way to Holland where he encounters his old philosophical mentor Pangloss who tells him of the terrible fate that has befallen Thunder-ten-Tronckh (destroyed) and Cunégonde (raped and murdered) at the hands of the same people Candide has just been fighting for.
Pangloss and Candide then head for Lisbon, where they are immediately shipwrecked and caught up in the aftermath of an earthquake, but manage to meet up with Cunégonde and her elderly lady-in-waiting, who are, it turns out, not dead after all. Pangloss, a little too free with the old philosophical discourse, is hanged for heresy and Candide and the ladies decide that a sharp exit is called for and board a ship for Buenos Aires. Unfortunately when they get there the local governor takes a fancy to Cunégonde and Candide is forced to flee when he is pursued by the local rozzers in relation to a couple of wholly regrettable but necessary killings he did back in Lisbon.
Candide and his new sidekick Cacambo head off via Paraguay to El Dorado, a paradise of peace and tranquility where the streets are paved with precious stones, but rather than kicking back for a bit Candide decides that he is missing Cunégonde and they head off northwards towards Surinam with nothing more than a colossal stash of priceless diamonds to sustain them and pay for their passage back to Europe.
After further adventures in England, Paris and Venice, during which he is reunited with Cacambo, and, more surprisingly, Pangloss (also not dead after all), Candide makes his way to Constantinople where Cacambo has located Cunégonde, sadly no longer the fresh-faced girl she once was but worn down by being raped and almost-murdered at the castle and then rented out to a series of men in Lisbon and Buenos Aires before being enslaved by a Transylvanian prince. Candide purchases everyone's freedom with the last of his diamonds, marries Cunégonde and they all set up home on a farm outside Constantinople and devote themselves to the simple life.
There's a lot going on here, especially in a novel amounting to only about 95 pages (the various notes and appendices in my Penguin Classics edition mean the whole thing is about 190 pages), and just as with Gulliver's Travels (a novel Candide resembles quite closely) there's a sense that a lot of barbed satirical points are being made about specific people and that a full appreciation of them is probably lost on the modern reader 250+ years later. Probably the main thing being satirised here is the notion, espoused by Gottfried Leibniz in real life and by Pangloss in the novel, that the world in which we live is the best of all possible worlds. The extraordinary abuse and indignity Voltaire visits upon his characters is an attempt to refute this idea - where this involves the repeated rape of the principal female character it's quite reminiscent of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Pilgermann.
Candide is the second book in this series to be the work of an author who went by just a single name - the first such author to feature here was Trevanian, only a few months ago. Needless to say Voltaire wasn't his real name; that was François-Marie Arouet, and while Candide is his most famous work he was a prolific writer and campaigner for civil liberties, freedom of religion and speech, and lots of other good and commendable stuff.
Anyway, this is all highly enjoyable and very short, though if you keep a finger in the footnotes section at the end and consult it as you go you will find this slows you down a bit even as it keeps you in the know.
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