Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet — essayist, playwright, historian, and the most combative writer of the French Enlightenment. The Lisbon earthquake of November 1755, which killed between thirty and fifty thousand people on All Saints’ Day as they attended church, struck him as a direct refutation of Leibniz. The poem included here was written within weeks of the disaster and is his most direct statement on the problem of evil: not satirical, not comic, but angry. His later Candide (1759) makes the same argument through devastating irony — Dr. Pangloss, the Leibnizian optimist, is flogged, hanged, and enslaved while insisting this is the best of all possible worlds.