The Black Tulip is one of the most unusual novels by the great Alexandre Dumas Alexandre Dumas. The events of the novel take place not in the writer’s native France, but in the Netherlands during the legendary seventeenth-century “Tulip Mania.” Enormous fortunes are made from tulips, and those same tulips ruin some of the wealthiest people in the country. Everyone trades in tulips: aristocrats and commoners, merchants and politicians. Honor, conscience, and even a woman’s love are sold for tulips. But one day, the flower grower Cornelius van Baerle discovers a way to cultivate a flower of the rarest color and extraordinary beauty. This treasure could make him rich forever—or cost him his life...
