In these last three chapters, Voltaire managed to bring together the leading characters in Candide and to provide a good resolution of the eventful story. Almost to the very end, the emphasis remained on humanity's irrationality, intolerance, cruelty, avarice. Much of this was illustrated by the narratives of the Jesuit baron and of Pangloss, whose account of his experiences with the "Portuguese barber" and his wife, however gruesome the details, provided the most hilarious bit of low comedy to be found in the tale.
Leading up to the final injunction that one must learn to cultivate his garden, Voltaire especially stressed the evils visited upon those in public life: the plight of the six kings, whom Candide cannot forget, as well as the strangulation and impaling of the viziers and the indications that their successors would fare no better. The good old man presumed "that in general those who meddle with public affairs sometimes perish miserably, and that they deserve it." Voltaire, one remembers, had had his difficulties in court and aristocratic circles; he had experienced imprisonment and exile. Finally he retired to his estates near Geneva and at Ferney, where he indeed "cultivated his garden," working diligently to the very end of his long life.
A deist, Voltaire believed in a god; the arrangements of the universe presupposed a designer. But to suppose that God intervenes in the affairs of the world was to him superstition. The key passage in which he made clear his point of view is the following:
