having been the
dupe of the pretended Jacob, he destroyed the sycamore behind which
the envious Isaac had spied into the garden; for the plot of ground
belonging to him had been bought by Cornelius, and taken into his own
garden.

Rosa, growing not only in beauty, but in wisdom also, after two years
of her married life, could read and write so well that she was able to
undertake by herself the education of two beautiful children which she
had borne in 1674 and 1675, both in May, the month of flowers.

As a matter of course, one was a boy, the other a girl, the former being
called Cornelius, the other Rosa.

Van Baerle remained faithfully attached to Rosa and to his tulips.
The whole of his life was devoted to the happiness of his wife and
the culture of flowers, in the latter of which occupations he was so
successful that a great number of his varieties found a place in the
catalogue of Holland.

The two principal ornaments of his drawing-room were those two leaves
from the Bible of Cornelius de Witt, in large golden frames; one of them
containing the letter in which his godfather enjoined him to burn the
correspondence of the Marquis de Louvois, and the other his own will,
in which he bequeathed to Rosa his bulbs under condition that she should
marry a young man of from twenty-six to twenty-eight years, who loved
her and whom she loved, a condition which was scrupulously fulfilled,
although, or rather because, Cornelius did not die.

And to ward off any envious attempts of another Isaac Boxtel, he wrote
over his door the lines which Grotius had, on the day of his flight,
scratched on the walls of his prison:--

"Sometimes one has suffered so much that he has the right never to be
able to say, 'I am too happy.'"

End of Project Gutenberg's The Black Tulip, by Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

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