Zadig

I began reading Voltaire's Zadig this afternoon, and I am enjoying the fierce Frenchman's satire in which the keenly observant Babylonian finds himself betrayed by women, condemned to death by a jealous monarch, and on the run to Egypt where – as I recall from reading this story as an undergraduate nearly half a century ago – more problems await the resourceful protagonist who will learn all about the fickle power of Providence.