



Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





THE BLACK TULIP

By Alexandre Dumas (Pere)




Chapter 1. A Grateful People


On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively,
so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with
its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses,
with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost
Eastern cupolas are reflected,--the city of the Hague, the capital of
the Seven United Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a
black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who,
with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or
sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible
prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, where, on the
charge of