The Black Tulip(黑郁金香).txt

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 mences, 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 dikes, ex-burgomaster of Dort, his native town, and
member of the Assembly of the States of Holland, was
forty-nine years of age, when the Dutch people, tired of the
Republic such as John de Witt, the Grand Pensionary of
Holland, understood it, at once conceived a most violent
affection for the Stadtholderate, which had been abolished
for ever in Holland by the "Perpetual E