The Black Tulip

Dumas gives his readers their money’s worth. In The Black Tulip, in the space of a mere 200 pages, he offers them a charming romance between his unjustly imprisoned hero and the jailer’s beautiful daughter, framed in a narrative that involves real characters and events from history, as well as a brief tour of Holland, with excursions into some notable aspects of Dutch life, culture, horticulture and art. In a relatively brief historical romance, Dumas sets out to convey the essence of a whole society and culture.

‘Do you want a sudden and complete feeling of foreignness?’ asked a writer reviewing a Dutch novel in the Revue des Deux Mondes in that same year of 1850. ‘Don’t go to Constantinople, go to Rotterdam.’¹ Close though it was to France, Holland in the nineteenth century could seem quite remote, with its quaint customs, its Protestant ethos, its regional costumes and picturesque little houses. In the mental geography of the French Romantics, southern Europe had always loomed larger; Spain and Italy attracted them far more than the cold, puritanical North. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a few travellers, including Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval and Dumas’s friend, the art critic Arsène Houssaye, ventured beyond French-speaking Belgium and helped, in the books that they wrote on their return, to create a more positive image of the Low Countries. Cleanliness and prosperity were the basic constituents of this image, but it was not perhaps as well-ordered a society as this might suggest. As could be seen from their art, the Dutch had a sense of beauty and order, but also of the grotesque (something that appealed to the Romantic imagination); they were associated with the Protestant values of sobriety and hard work, but at the same time with feasting and riotous excess.

Holland was seen, too, as an egalitarian society, the majority of its population belonging to a relatively affluent peasant class in the countryside or to the wealthy bourgeoisie in the towns. The Golden Age, when Holland had been the most prosperous country in Europe and a major naval power, might be over, but Dutch people still enjoyed a high standard of living. Some of this Dumas himself had the opportunity to observe, if only briefly, when he travelled to Holland in May 1849 for the coronation of King William III. It was on this occasion, apparently, that an acquaintance, the composer Friedrich von Flatow, told him about the history of the de Witt brothers, and their terrible fate at the hands of a mob in the Hague, in August 1672.

Dumas was, in the conventional sense, an uneducated man, with little knowledge of history. After the death of his father in 1806, when Alexandre was only four years old, he and his mother suffered a good deal of financial hardship. Dumas attended local schools until the age of fourteen, then went out to work. He came to write about history more by accident than by choice and always considered it, first and foremost, as a source of good stories. In other words, unlike most historical novelists, he did not intend to put his novelist’s imagination to the service of the past, in order to throw light on events and the motivations of historical characters; rather, he drew on history because it provided good material for his imaginative fictions. Dumas always worked with collaborators, such as, in the case of The Black Tulip, Auguste Maquet, to whom he probably left the task of gathering the historical facts. The story of the de Witts – a gory tale of treachery and ingratitude – attracted his interest, but its purpose was to provide a peg on which to hang the entirely invented tale of Cornelius and Rosa. As for William of Orange, the one historical character who survives from start to finish, he appears in a totally different guise at either end of the book, firstly as the evil manipulator behind the murder of the de Witts, then as the wise ruler who sees justice done. There is nothing here that explains his motives or gives the basis for an informed judgement of his historical role. All we know is that he is reserved and inscrutable – and this could well be for no other reason than that Dumas is confusing William III with his great-grandfather, who was called ‘The Silent’.

None the less, the novel does keep to the main facts in its account of the murder of the de Witts, and to understand its opening one must know a little about the earlier history of the region. Holland had been formed out of the seven northern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands (the ten southern provinces eventually coming together as Belgium). These United Provinces of the north had declared their independence from Spain in 1579, under the leadership of William the Silent, Prince of Orange. The war had not always gone their way, but by 1600 they were free of Spanish troops (though technically the war with Spain continued for another forty-eight years). The period that followed the achievement of independence was one of extraordinary prosperity for Holland, a time that is still known as de Goude Eeuw, or Golden Age, during which the Netherlands became the leading commercial power in Europe, and the country with the highest standard of living.

William the Silent was assassinated in 1584. He had not been a monarch in the conventional sense, but Stadhouder, a hereditary title for the head of state and military commander, who ruled in conjunction with the States-General, led by the Raadpensionaris, the elected Pensionary of the State of Holland. Inevitably, the division of functions in the States produced friction between the Stadhouder and the Raadpensionaris, which came to a head under William the Silent’s grandson, William II. When William II died in 1650, leaving only a posthumous heir, the office of Stadhouder was left vacant. In 1653, the leader of the republican faction, Johan de Witt, became Raadpensionaris and eventually had the office of Stadhouder abolished in perpetuity.

De Witt was a brilliant statesman and diplomat, who devoted himself to maintaining his country’s independence. He ended the first war with Holland’s maritime rival, England, and managed to secure a favourable end to a second outbreak of war from 1665 to 1667. He also successfully formed the Triple Alliance against Louis XIV, who by his marriage had acquired a claim to the Dutch throne. But the chief threat to de Witt’s power came from William II’s son, William of Orange, whose pretention to the Stadhouderat was supported by a powerful faction within the country. In 1672, William was made Stadhouder and the Perpetual Edict abolishing the title was rescinded. De Witt resigned, but was exonerated when subsequently charged with treason.

The tulip probably arrived in Europe from the Near East in the mid-sixteenth century and soon became popular with growers in France.⁵ Among the first to introduce the flower into Holland was Charles de l’Escluse, or Clusius, who brought his tulip bulbs to Holland when he was appointed to a post at the University of Leyden in 1593. He set up a botanical garden at the university, which attracted the attention of enthusiasts in a country starting to enjoy the prosperity that came from its leadership in the realm of international trade.

It takes a long time, six or seven years, to grow tulips from seed, but once a plant has flowered, it produces outgrowths from its bulb, known as ‘offsets’, which can be removed and planted, to produce separate tulips that will themselves flower in a year or two. These ‘offsets’ play a central role in The Black Tulip.

The wild tulip is a flower of a single colour, but cross-pollination when flowers are grown together in gardens or nurseries has a tendency to produce hybrids, which in turn can be cross-pollinated to produce increasingly complex varieties. But the characteristic that most interested growers was the tendency of the tulip bulb to ‘break’: for a bulb from a tulip of a single colour to produce, quite unpredictably, a flower with a new, sometimes elaborate colour scheme – a white flower flecked or fringed with red, yellow or purple. Growers had no idea what caused ‘breaking’; it was not until the twentieth century that it was discovered to be the effect of a virus (which explained a phenomenon that had already been observed, which was that broken tulips were weaker than others). Once broken, a bulb would remain broken; in other words, its seeds and offsets (unless they broke in their turn), would continue to exhibit the new patterns. The dazzling array of colours and new varieties produced by breaking was the reason for the tulip’s unique popularity, while the unpredictability of the process and the length of time taken to grow the flowers explain the value that the bulbs rapidly came to acquire.

The market for tulip bulbs was in some respects comparable to that for paintings and other works of art, price being determined by the rarity of the object and the aesthetic value placed on it by the purchaser. Tulips were considered to exhibit the height of natural beauty; they were worshipped as evidence of God’s artistry, and they were prized as objects displaying the taste and wealth of their owner. Very soon, the finest varieties were changing hands for astonishing sums of money and being given extravagant names in addition to their Latin ones: Admiral Pottebacker, General van Gouda and Semper Augustus. The last of these, apparently a variety that was slow to produce offsets, became the most famous and highly prized of all. By the 1630s, a single flower of a good variety could be worth many times the price of a painting of tulips by the finest artists in the field (who included Jan Brueghel and Ambrosius Bosschaert).

Once the market started to grow, there was no stopping it. By the mid-1630s, bulbs were changing hands for prices equivalent to the cost of a house – and in some cases to the cost of the finest town houses in the centre of Amsterdam. Bulbs and offsets were no longer sold as a piece, but by weight, using a goldsmith’s measure, the ace, so that the buyer could have a better idea of the bulb’s maturity. Once the most highly prized tulips had acquired such monetary value, their worth as aesthetic objects became less important; and since it took time for the bulbs themselves to flower, buyers often purchased bulbs which were left with the grower to mature in the ground. The bill of sale could then be sold on by the purchaser and might change hands several times, increasing in price as it did so. Each new buyer was in fact speculating on the eventual value of the flower and a sort of futures market in tulips came into being. Tulips were no longer valued as flowers, they had become a form of currency, an abstraction, traded for thousands of florins in taverns throughout Holland, by buyers and sellers who had never seen and probably never would see the property for which such huge sums of money were being exchanged. In this sense, they were comparable to those impressionist paintings that are bought as an investment by corporations and pension funds, then kept in a vault.

The crash came early in 1637, with terrifying suddenness. The price of tulips simply collapsed and those who were left with the vastly overvalued bulbs were often ruined. One of them was Jan van Goyen, a successful landscape artist who had given up painting altogether to spend the money he had earned with his brushes on speculating in bulbs. In January 1637 he purchased a total of fifty bulbs for the price of 912 florins (roughly the value of fifty tons of wheat or a hundred sheep) and two of his own paintings. Within days, the market crashed and he was bankrupt. He returned to painting and spent the rest of his life working to pay off his debts, but had still not done so when he died in 1656.

From being an example of God’s artistry, the tulip became a symbol of human folly, the subject of sermons and caricatures. But instead of a speculator in bulbs caught up in the madness of the 1630s, Dumas shows us a man dedicated to breeding new varieties of the flower, whose passion, far from being a form of madness, is a shield against the kind of insanity that led to the assassination of the de Witt brothers. Cornelius van Baerle, in obedience to his godfather and namesake Cornelius de Witt, has experienced a naval battle; he has seen ships blown up and men perishing, and observed that, after all the destruction and slaughter, ‘nothing had been settled either for or against, but that each side claimed victory, that everything had to be done all over again and that another name, that of Southwold Bay, had simply been added to the catalogue of battles’ (Chapter 5) – so he decides to take literally Candide’s advice in Voltaire’s novel, and cultivate his garden.

Although there are similarities between the great tulipomania of the Dutch Golden Age and the modern art market, the source of the aesthetic super-value attached to the objects, which explains their apparently ridiculous price, is rather different. Mike Dash, whose book on the subject treats it primarily as an economic phenomenon, also points out that one reason why people in the seventeenth century attached such importance to the flower was that they saw it as the summit of creation in this particular sphere: ‘The tulip was,’ the French horticulturalist Monstereul wrote, ‘supreme among flowers in the same way that humans were lords of the animals, diamonds eclipsed all other precious stones, and the sun ruled the stars.⁶ The value that the Dutch placed on the flower was founded on the notion of flowers as the epitome of God’s creation and their beauty as a means to glorify their Creator – a recurrent theme in the novel. Hence, too, the superiority of the natural flower over its representation by ‘a painter, that is to say a kind of madman who tries to reproduce the wonders of Nature on canvas, disfiguring them’ (Chapter 5).

This is the view that Dumas attributes to his villain, Isaac Boxtel, and it is not necessarily his own. Cornelius, though he may apply his genius to the creation of flowers, is still an artist, and behind this romance – charming or trivial, as you wish – is a reflection on Art. Since this is a novel by Dumas, there is nothing dull or heavy-handed in the way the subject is approached. But the tulip – ‘that masterpiece of creation’ (Chapter 5), ‘a wonderful combination of nature and art’ (Chapter 13) – is the other heroine of the novel, as Rosa realizes: she readily acknowledges the flower as her rival for Cornelius’s love.

The tulip is central to the novel because of its role in the mechanism of the plot; but it also takes on a more symbolic function in the relationships between the main characters. It becomes the third party in the story of the relationship between Rosa and Cornelius, involving him in a struggle between his love for her and his art. It is the motive for Boxtel’s jealousy of Cornelius, a jealousy that is all the more intense since Boxtel is enough of a tulip grower himself to appreciate his rival’s superior genius, just as Salieri is supposed to have been able to appreciate that of Mozart – ‘for, underneath it all, he [Boxtel] was an artist and his rival’s masterpiece meant a lot to him’ (Chapter 6). The difference is that Boxtel has to struggle to achieve ‘an art that he [Cornelius] seemed to be acquiring by instinct’, so that in a mere two years he has ‘covered his flowerbeds with such wonderful productions as no one, except perhaps Shakespeare and Rubens, had created after God’ (Chapter 6).

Even though the exact nature of Cornelius’s activity is problematic – Dumas most often refers to him as ‘discovering’ a new flower, only near the end describing him as ‘the author of the tulip’ (Chapter 31) – the novel can still be read as an allegory of artistic creation: in this sense, it describes, in Cornelius’s imprisonment, the artist’s solitary struggle to give birth to his masterpiece, with Rosa as his Muse. He has to struggle against the incomprehension of the ignorant (Gryphus) and the corruption and envy of those who wish to exploit it for money or fame (Boxtel), as well as against the inner temptations or distractions of politics and love, until his eventual triumph, when his creation is publicly hailed and given the recognition it deserves.

Painting in the Netherlands was broadly seen as a development of the German school, that of Dürer, and it tended to elicit admiration rather than enthusiasm. On the whole, travellers from France were more likely to head south, towards Italy. This had been particularly true of artists, under the influence of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (later the École des Beaux-Arts), when conventional theory accorded the highest status to paintings of subjects derived from Greek and Roman mythology, and made the study of classical models an essential part of the artist’s training. The annual Prix de Rome offered four years’ free study at the Académie de France in Rome to the best students of the École des Beaux-Arts, who were required to make copies of classical sculpture and Italian Renaissance paintings.

None the less, the Louvre in the early nineteenth century had a reasonably representative collection of Flemish and Dutch paintings from the Golden Age, and the changes in perception that took place during the 1820s prepared the way for a new appreciation of their qualities. The Romantics valued truth above conventional notions of beauty; they could see the beauty in what might conventionally be dismissed as ugliness. They were not greatly interested in classical mythology or in grand generalizations; they sought local colour and the specifics that distinguish places and people, rather than universals.

As a result of this, characteristics of the painters of the Low Countries that had previously been considered as defects came to appear as strengths: there was a special kind of poetry in these pleasant, human landscapes and genre scenes. Indeed, the periodical L’Artiste, which did a great deal to promote appreciation of Dutch painters, with both articles and lithographs, actually suggested that they had benefited from staying at home, rather than travelling to Italy and copying classical statuary and Italian masters: ‘The sedentary life of these admirable artists… is the quite natural explanation of the superiority of their manner of painting… the artists who travelled a lot are almost always superficial in what they observe.’⁸

One writer who contributed a great deal to this new assessment of Dutch and Flemish art was Dumas’s friend Arsène Houssaye, a regular contributor to L’Artiste and La Revue de Paris, and the author of a two-volume history of Dutch and Flemish painting.⁹ Dumas was also acquainted with the Dutch painter Ary Scheffer, born in Dordrecht in 1795, who became drawing master to the children of King Louis-Philippe and, if only by his presence among them, helped to direct the attention of his French contemporaries to Dutch art.¹⁰

These writers were in no doubt as to the importance of art as a key to the Dutch soul. ‘The true poets of Holland are above all her landscape painters,’ Houssaye wrote,¹¹ having noted that in the Netherlands, painting took the place of literature: the history of the country, its customs, its scenery and so on, are in its painting – ‘when one has that sort of poetry, can’t one do without the other? Isn’t Rembrandt equal to Molière and Ruysdael to La Fontaine?’¹² He admits, however, that Dutch painting is lacking in thought and feeling: ‘more concerned with the living forces of Truth than with the high peaks of the Ideal, it has not been able to achieve the Beauty enshrined in the precious monuments of Greece and Rome’.¹³

It is not surprising, then, that in The Black Tulip Dumas makes repeated references to Dutch painting, both to support his argument on Art and Nature, and to conjure up a scene in the reader’s mind. When, for example, he writes about the de Witts’ servant Craeke riding through ‘the winding meanders of the river which, with moist embrace, enfold those charming islands, fringed with willows, rushes and flowering grasses where fat flocks idly graze under the bright sun’ (Chapter 5), he clearly has in his mind’s eye a painting, perhaps by Paul Potter – ‘friend of cows and cowherds, who so well understood the indolence of great oxen… sublimely naive’¹⁴ – or by Ruysdael, who ‘lived in familiarity with running water, rustling leaves, hedgerows, meadow grasses… the little boat asleep on the stream…’,¹⁵ or Berghem, who, Houssaye says, was ‘the happiest man in the world, realizing that dream of all poetic souls: love and art’¹⁶ – a phrase that could almost have been written to describe the hero of Dumas’s novel, that supremely contented artist, doctor, tulip grower and lover, Cornelius van Baerle.

Dumas refers by name in the novel to seven painters: Gerrit Dow, Franz van Mieris, Rubens, Rembrandt, Gabriel Metsù, David Teniers the Elder and David Teniers the Younger. These allusions are not simply intended to embellish the text or exhibit the author’s erudition. Each one has a specific purpose in its context and together they are intended to situate the novel in the cultural context of mid-seventeenth-century Holland.

The name of Peter Paul Rubens would have been familiar to all of Dumas’s readers; the painter is the pivotal figure in Houssaye’s history of Flemish and Dutch art, the first volume of which ends and the second begins with this ‘genius of the first order’. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Academy was divided over the merits of Rubens and Poussin, Rubens been seen as the great colourist and Poussin – ‘the classic and virtuous Poussin’¹⁷ – as the great exponent of form. Rubens’s name appears only once in The Black Tulip, in a passage already quoted, coupled with that of Shakespeare, as second only to God in creative power (Chapter 6). Rembrandt, too, is mentioned in passing, his name suggested by the contrasts of light and dark in a scene on the prison stairs (Chapter 9).

Houssaye discusses both Gerrit Dow and Gabriel Metsù together under the general heading ‘Painters of Private Life’, emphasizing their qualities of meticulous observation, harmony and truthfulness. Dow, he says, would spend three days painting a single hand, which made him the despair of his patrons, his paintings reflecting the simplicity of his own life. As for Metsù, Houssaye says that ‘no colourist ever possessed the gift of harmony to a higher degree’.¹⁸ In the case of van Mieris, Dumas may be uncertain of the distinction between Franz van Mieris, who was a contemporary of Metsù and of the events of the novel, and his son Willem: it is the latter whose work corresponds more closely to the description of Rosa as being like ‘those delightful women of Mieris and Metsù… framed in the first green shoots of the honeysuckle and wild vine’ (Chapter 23).

The charm of the Dutch interior, with its Protestant bourgeois cleanliness and decency, contrasts with that other aspect of life in the Low Countries, the kermesse. The Dutch were famous for their drinking, carousing and merry-making: ‘Never has more natural laziness produced more eagerness in shouting, singing and dancing than that shown by the good republicans of the Seven Provinces on the occasion of a fête’ (Chapter 31), Dumas tells us, citing as evidence the paintings of David Teniers the Elder and David Teniers the Younger, both specialists in themes of weddings, cabarets and peasant dances. Once again, there were examples in the Louvre, including the younger Teniers’s paintings of a village wedding, a village fête, peasants dancing with bagpipes and the interior of a tavern.

By contrast to these apt references to Dutch painting, direct observation of Dutch scenery and towns is not especially evident in the novel. Dumas describes Dordrecht, Cornelius’s home town, as hilly, when it is in fact a port built on reclaimed marshland, and paintings of the town by Cuyp, van Goyen and others show it as flat. What struck A. J. du Pays, one of Dumas’s contemporaries, about Dutch towns was the uniformity of decoration on the façades of the houses and the tendency to use a single colour for all the houses in a given town,¹⁹ Dordrecht’s colour being yellow. It may be that in speaking of the bright red houses there, trimmed with white, bathing their feet in the water and with Oriental carpets hanging out at the windows (see Chapter 5), Dumas was thinking more of Amsterdam. But, as we know, he tended not to be meticulous about such details, as long as he had a good story to tell.