Just Finished Reading The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was a popular nineteenth century French writer who is most famous for his novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.  His stories generally feature adventure and romance...I probably should get around to reading more of them.  I just finished reading my first Dumas book, the 1850 historical fiction work The Black Tulip.  It harkens back to Holland in the seventeenth century, a few decades after their fanaticism with growing and speculating on tulips.  The year is 1672 and a mob of angry citizens has just lynched the innocent prime minister Johan de Witt along with his brother Cornelius, both of whom had legally been sentenced to exile.  After the deaths, the godson of Cornelius, Cornelius van Baerle, receives an urgent letter from him to burn the contents of a parcel he had earlier given to him for safekeeping, but the young man, distracted by his fascination for tulips and his entry into a nationwide contest to become the first to develop and produce a purely black form of the flower, carelessly puts the letter aside.  Authorities soon search his home and find the parcel, which contains secret correspondences between the de Witts and Holland's then-enemy France.  Van Baerle is arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to a quick execution...since this tale is about him, his romance with the prison keeper's daughter Rosa, and his competition with his (unknown to him) adversary Isaac Boxtel for the black tulip prize...we can assume that the executioner's hand will be stayed.  And you, the potential reader of this story, can find out for yourself what happens next and how it all ends...

There is a lot of political intrigue in The Black Tulip, and Dumas seems to lay the blame for the brutal deaths of the de Witt brothers at the feet of that country's Prince William.  Whether this is historically true I don't know, but the author's version of the incident did open up for me an area of European history about which I did not previously know.  I did know of the tulip craze in Holland, though, and being someone who never was all that interested in flowers...or even horticulture in general, I couldn't grasp how anyone could be so lost in his interest of flowers and gardening like young Cornelius van Baerle to the point where he simply ignored his dire situation and allow himself to be apprehended like that.  Even after his imprisonment, van Baerle continued to act as if his special tulip bulbs were more important to him than anything else in the world, an impression sadly not lost on poor Rosa, who was deeply in love in him...

Will I count The Black Tulip among my favorite books?  I doubt it, but it's still a worthy investment of your reading time should you undertake it...especially if you, like me, have an interest in history.  Oh, I failed to mention in an earlier review of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables that the book I read was a translation into English from the original French text...the same is true here for The Black Tulip by Dumas...