The Black Tulip

In The Hague in 1672, a furious crowd murders the brothers Johan and Cornelius de Witt, the leaders of the Dutch republic. Cornelius's godson, a gentle tulip grower named Cornelius van Baerle, is drawn into the affair through a packet of letters left in his care, just as he is close to breeding a pure black tulip, the flower that would win a fortune from the growers of Haarlem.

Imprisoned in the fortress of Loevestein, he finds help in Rosa, the jailer's daughter, and the novel becomes a love story built around a single bulb. Published in 1850, it is shorter and quieter than The Three Musketeers, and it opens with a powerful scene of real historical violence.

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) was the grandson of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman of African descent in Saint-Domingue; his father became a general of the Revolution. Arriving in Paris as a clerk with little education, Dumas made his name in the theatre and then, with the collaborator Auguste Maquet, turned history into the most popular adventure novels of the century.

The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo were followed by dozens more, earning fortunes that Dumas spent as fast as they came, on travel, newspapers and a fantastic château. In 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris among the great figures of France.