“Alas! you are very happy, who, dreaming only of what
perhaps is the true glory of Holland, and forms especially
her true happiness, do not attempt to acquire for her
anything beyond new colours of tulips.”
And, casting a glance towards that point of the compass
where France lay, as if he saw new clouds gathering there,
he entered his carriage and drove off.
Cornelius started on the same day for Dort with Rosa, who
sent her lover’s old housekeeper as a messenger to her
father, to apprise him of all that had taken place.
Those who, thanks to our description, have learned the
character of old Gryphus, will comprehend that it was hard
for him to become reconciled to his son-in-law. He had not
yet forgotten the blows which he had received in that famous
encounter. To judge from the weals which he counted, their
number, he said, amounted to forty-one; but at last, in
order, as he declared, not to be less generous than his
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Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip
Highness the Stadtholder, he consented to make his peace.
Appointed to watch over the tulips, the old man made the
rudest keeper of flowers in the whole of the Seven
Provinces.
It was indeed a sight to see him watching the obnoxious
moths and butterflies, killing slugs, and driving away the
hungry bees.
As he had heard Boxtel’s story, and was furious at having
been the dupe of the pretended Jacob, he destroyed the
sycamore behind which the envious Isaac had spied into the
garden; for the plot of ground belonging to him had been
bought by Cornelius, and taken into his own garden.
Rosa, growing not only in beauty, but in wisdom also, after
two years of her married life, could read and write so well
that she was able to undertake by herself the education of
two beautiful children which she had borne in 1674 and 1675,
both in May, the month of flowers.
As a matter of course, one was a boy, the other a girl, the
former being called Cornelius, the other Rosa.
Van Baerle remained faithfully attached to Rosa and to his
tulips. The whole of his life was devoted to the happiness
of his wife and the culture of flowers, in the latter of
which occupations he was so successful that a great number
of his varieties found a place in the catalogue of Holland.
The two principal ornaments of his drawing-room were those
two leaves from the Bible of Cornelius de Witt, in large
golden frames; one of them containing the letter in which
his godfather enjoined him to burn the correspondence of the
Marquis de Louvois, and the other his own will, in which he
bequeathed to Rosa his bulbs under condition that she should
marry a young man of from twenty-six to twenty-eight years,
who loved her and whom she loved, a condition which was
scrupulously fulfilled, although, or rather because,
Cornelius did not die.
And to ward off any envious attempts of another Isaac
Boxtel, he wrote over his door the lines which Grotius had,
on the day of his flight, scratched on the walls of his
prison: —
“Sometimes one has suffered so much that he has the right
never to be able to say, ‘I am too happy.'”