Zadig is a wise, virtuous, and remarkably fortunate young man in ancient Babylon — until fortune turns against him. Voltaire follows his hero through a dizzying series of reversals: love won and lost, honors granted and stripped away, narrow escapes from prison, slavery, and the executioner, all delivered with the author's cool irony and comic timing.
Beneath the exotic adventures runs a sustained philosophical inquiry. Again and again Zadig acts justly and reasonably, and again and again the world rewards him with catastrophe, forcing both hero and reader to weigh the claims of providence, chance, and human justice. The novella's famous episodes — Zadig's deductions about the missing horse and dog, his debates with sages, his encounter with a mysterious angel — became models for later writers, and are often cited as an ancestor of the detective story.
Sharp, brisk, and quietly subversive, Zadig ou la Destinée is one of Voltaire's central contes philosophiques, using an oriental tale to probe the problem of evil and the limits of what reason can explain.