Alexandre Dumas — The Black Tulip, Part 1

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Alexandre Dumas — The Black Tulip, Part 1 The Alexandre Dumas season continues with his most perfect short novel. Holland, 1672 — the Year of Disaster. Cornelius van Baerle of Dort asks nothing of the world but his tulips: from hazel-nut shade to roasted coffee he has bred his way toward the grand black tulip and the hundred thousand guilders of the Haarlem prize, and on an August morning he lifts from the border three perfect suckers of the flower that will make his name. But his neighbour Isaac Boxtel has watched it all through a telescope, and envy has done its work; and in a drawer of the dry-room, among the ticketed bulbs, lies a sealed parcel — the correspondence of the fallen Grand Pensionary, John de Witt, entrusted to his godson in January and never once opened. Part One carries the tale from the tulip beds of Dort to the knock of the magistrate at the white house's door, and to the night a thief climbs the garden wall and finds the earth already empty. Amos narrates. Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices. Chapters: 00:00 Opening theme 00:35 Introduction 02:38 Chapter One: The Tulip-fancier and his Neighbour 22:20 Chapter Two: The Hatred of a Tulip-fancier 39:47 Chapter Three: The Happy Man makes Acquaintance with Misfortune 65:11 Chapter Four: An Invasion The Black Tulip, by Alexandre Dumas, in the public-domain English translation preserved by Project Gutenberg (eBook #965; the translator is uncredited, as was common for the period editions), read here in fresh narration. One ruling of this shelf is stated plainly: the novel's Hague opening — the fall of the brothers de Witt — is excluded from this telling by name, and is carried only as the story's premise, in the host's frame; the telling opens at Dort with the servant Craeke, and two graphic clauses of that excluded event which stand inside the carried chapters are likewise set aside and logged in the build record. Nothing else is cut: the envy, the deposit, the arrest, and the empty flower-bed are Dumas's own, entire. Seven parts are projected for the whole novel. Music: opening and closing themes and separators from "Mountain Revelation" (house music pool), gate-passed for this episode. A continuous instrumental bed from "Sweeping Triumph" (house music pool) plays quietly beneath the narration. Music drawn from the channel's existing house pool of owner-deposited instrumentals. Source: Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip — Project Gutenberg eBook #965. KacheliTV — World Classics, Read Aloud.