Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip

we should give him pleasure if we were to maintain and

establish that nothing is impossible for a florist who

avails himself with judgment and discretion and patience of

the sun’s heat; the clear water, the juices of the earth,

and the cool breezes. But this is not a treatise upon tulips

in general; it is the story of one particular tulip which we

have undertaken to write, and to that we limit ourselves,

however alluring the subject which is so closely allied to

ours.

Boxtel, once more worsted by the superiority of his hated

rival, was now completely disgusted with tulip-growing, and,

being driven half mad, devoted himself entirely to

observation.

The house of his rival was quite open to view; a garden

exposed to the sun; cabinets with glass walls, shelves,

cupboards, boxes, and ticketed pigeon-holes, which could

easily be surveyed by the telescope. Boxtel allowed his

bulbs to rot in the pits, his seedlings to dry up in their

cases, and his tulips to wither in the borders and

henceforward occupied himself with nothing else but the

doings at Van Baerle’s. He breathed through the stalks of

Van Baerle’s tulips, quenched his thirst with the water he

sprinkled upon them, and feasted on the fine soft earth

which his neighbour scattered upon his cherished bulbs.

But the most curious part of the operations was not

performed in the garden.

It might be one o’clock in the morning when Van Baerle went

up to his laboratory, into the glazed cabinet whither

Boxtel’s telescope had such an easy access; and here, as

soon as the lamp illuminated the walls and windows, Boxtel

saw the inventive genius of his rival at work.

He beheld him sifting his seeds, and soaking them in liquids

which were destined to modify or to deepen their colours. He

knew what Cornelius meant when heating certain grains, then

moistening them, then combining them with others by a sort

of grafting, — a minute and marvellously delicate

Page 44

Dumas, Alexandre – The Black Tulip

manipulation, — and when he shut up in darkness those which

were expected to furnish the black colour, exposed to the

sun or to the lamp those which were to produce red, and

placed between the endless reflections of two water-mirrors

those intended for white, the pure representation of the

limpid element.

This innocent magic, the fruit at the same time of

child-like musings and of manly genius — this patient

untiring labour, of which Boxtel knew himself to be

incapable — made him, gnawed as he was with envy, centre

all his life, all his thoughts, and all his hopes in his

telescope.

For, strange to say, the love and interest of horticulture

had not deadened in Isaac his fierce envy and thirst of

revenge. Sometimes, whilst covering Van Baerle with his

telescope, he deluded himself into a belief that he was

levelling a never-failing musket at him; and then he would

seek with his finger for the trigger to fire the shot which

was to have killed his neighbour. But it is time that we

should connect with this epoch of the operations of the one,

and the espionage of the other, the visit which Cornelius de

Witt came to pay to his native town.

Chapter 7

The Happy Man makes Acquaintance with Misfortune

Cornelius de Witt, after having attended to his family

affairs, reached the house of his godson, Cornelius van

Baerle, one evening in the month of January, 1672.

De Witt, although being very little of a horticulturist or

of an artist, went over the whole mansion, from the studio

to the green-house, inspecting everything, from the pictures

down to the tulips. He thanked his godson for having joined

him on the deck of the admiral’s ship “The Seven Provinces,”

during the battle of Southwold Bay, and for having given his

name to a magnificent tulip; and whilst he thus, with the

kindness and affability of a father to a son, visited Van

Baerle’s treasures, the crowd gathered with curiosity, and

even respect, before the door of the happy man.

All this hubbub excited the attention of Boxtel, who was

just taking his meal by his fireside. He inquired what it