The Garden Is Not a Metaphor

At the end of Candide, everyone is given a job. Cunegonde makes pastry. The old woman looks after the linen. Friar Giroflée builds furniture. Paquette embroiders. The Baron tends the garden with them, his seventy-two quarterings unreferenced.

Pangloss, incorrigible, gives his last speech. He recites the list of kings who fell — Croesus, Darius, Pompey, Nero, twelve more — as evidence that the current state of affairs is the best possible one. There is a concatenation of events. If you had not been kicked out of the castle, you would not be here eating preserved citrons. Therefore, all is for the best.

Candide says: "All that is very well, but we must cultivate our garden."

People read this as resignation. As pragmatism. As a withdrawal from philosophy into common sense. And it is all of those things, but it is also something more specific: it is a refusal to answer the question.

Pangloss has spent the entire book being catastrophically wrong while maintaining that he is right. The Inquisition hung him. The syphilis disfigured him. He witnessed the Lisbon earthquake, the auto-da-fé, the slaughter of the Anabaptist Jacques. Each time he said: this is for the best. Each time Candide believed him, and then watched another thing go wrong.

Martin is the inverse. Everything goes wrong. The world is governed by evil. There is no best of all possible worlds; there is only the worst of many bad ones. Martin has the empirical record on his side and is also, somehow, just as useless.

The dervish, consulted near the end, refuses to engage at all. "Is it your business?" he says when asked about the problem of evil, and shuts the door. This is Voltaire's actual answer, three chapters early: the question is not your business. Work is your business.

The garden is not a metaphor for acceptance or humility or the good life. It is a literal garden that produces "plentiful crops." The pistachio nuts are pistachio nuts. The preserved citrons are preserved citrons. Cunegonde's pastry is pastry.

This specificity is the whole point.

Pangloss says: the world is organized to be good, everything is for the best, suffering is proof of a hidden order. Martin says: the world is organized toward evil, suffering is the basic fact. Both are making a claim about the organization of things at the cosmic level. Both are asking: is there a frame in which all of this makes sense?

Candide's answer is that this is the wrong question. Not because the answer is unknowable (though it may be), but because the question is idle. It produces Pangloss, who justifies everything and prevents nothing. It produces Martin, who explains everything and changes nothing. It produces the dervish's shut door.

The garden doesn't need to be the best of all possible gardens. It needs watering.

There is a detail earlier in the book that the ending echoes. Candide discovers El Dorado — a genuine utopia, the best of all possible worlds made actual. Gold is pebbles. Children play with rubies and emeralds and abandon them in the street. There are no prisons, no priests who dispute and burn, no lawsuits. Everyone thanks God morning and evening for what they have. The palace of sciences contains two thousand feet of mathematical instruments.

Candide stays for a month. Then he decides to leave.

His reasoning: "If we remain here we shall only be as others here, whereas if we return to our own world with only a dozen sheep laden with the pebbles of El Dorado, we shall be richer than all the kings in Europe."

He can't be happy in a place where everyone is happy. Happiness in El Dorado is categorical; it belongs to everyone by right. What Candide wants is happiness that means something — happiness-as-distinction, happiness-at-someone-else's-expense. Paradise requires contrast.

So he leaves paradise, and everything he carried out of it (102 sheep) is systematically destroyed by the world he returned to.

The garden at the end is the answer to El Dorado, not just to Pangloss. El Dorado failed because Candide tried to use it as a competitive advantage. The garden works because no one is trying to be richer than the kings of Europe. They are trying to eat pistachio nuts and have something to do.

"We must cultivate our garden."

Not: the garden is good. Not: gardening will make you happy. Not: cultivate as a metaphor for anything.

Just: there is work to do, and doing it is better than not doing it, and the three great evils that work prevents are weariness, vice, and want.

The old Turk with twenty acres doesn't know who the vizier is. He doesn't care. His daughters make sherbet. His sons help him in the field. When Candide, freshly arrived from a supper with six dethroned kings, tells him that two of the viziers he might have heard of were recently strangled, the old man says only: "I know nothing of it; I imagine that, in general, those who meddle with public affairs sometimes perish miserably, and that they deserve it; but I never inquire what is doing at Constantinople."

This is not Pangloss. The old Turk is not saying: it was for the best that they were strangled. He is saying: it was not my business. The question of whether the vizier deserved it, whether the Sultan was right, whether this is the best of all possible empires — none of this will water the garden.

The final image: Pangloss delivers his last speech, and Candide silences him with seven words.

What makes the ending good — really good, not just neatly quotable — is that Pangloss is not refuted. Candide doesn't say "you are wrong" or "that philosophy ruined us." He says: "All that is very well." The concatenation of events is, perhaps, real. Perhaps without the auto-da-fé there would be no pastry, without the pirate there would be no return to Cunegonde, without the Baron's snobbery there would be no El Dorado.

But.

We must cultivate our garden.

The "but" isn't a logical counter to Pangloss. It's a change of subject. Pangloss is still talking about the structure of the universe. Candide has moved to the garden. The conversation ends not because one position defeated another but because one of the parties stopped having it.

That's the joke. And also not a joke.