



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 attempted murder preferred against him by the surgeon
Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of
Holland was confined.

If the history of that time, and especially that of the year in the
middle of which our narrative commences, were not indissolubly connected
with the two names just mentioned, the few explanatory pages which we
are about to add might appear quite supererogatory; but we will, from
the very first, apprise the reader--our old friend, to whom we are wont
on the first page to promise amusement, and with whom we always try to
keep our word as well as is in our power--that this explanation is as
indispensable to the right understanding of our story as to that of the
great event itself on which it is based.

Cornelius de Witt, Ruart de Pulten, that is to say, warden of the d