Zadig

Zadig is a wise and good young man in ancient Babylon, and his wisdom brings him nothing but trouble. In one famous chapter he describes the queen's lost dog and the king's runaway horse without having seen them, simply by reading their tracks, and is fined for it. He rises to become the king's minister, falls, becomes a slave and wanders the East, wondering whether justice governs the world.

Published in 1747 in the style of the Oriental tales that the Arabian Nights had made fashionable, Zadig is one of Voltaire's most charming stories. Its chapter of deduction from small clues is often cited as an ancestor of the detective story, long before Sherlock Holmes.

François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who called himself Voltaire, was imprisoned twice in the Bastille as a young man for his satirical verses. Exiled to England, he returned full of admiration for its freedoms and wrote the Letters on England, which were burned in Paris.

He lived for years with the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, spent a stormy period at the court of Frederick the Great and finally settled at Ferney, near the Swiss border, from where he campaigned against religious intolerance and miscarriages of justice. He wrote plays, history and poetry, but his tales, Candide and Zadig, are what most readers love today.