The Black Tulip

Holland, 1672: a mob tears two statesmen to pieces in the street, and a quiet gentleman in Dordrecht goes on trying to breed a black tulip because a hundred thousand guilders are offered for one. Dumas takes the real lynching of the De Witt brothers, sets a flower contest beside it, and lets a jealous neighbor do the rest. The tulip mania was forty years past and the greed was not.