Tulip Fever
Deborah Moggach
published 2000
288 pages
In 1630s Amsterdam, tulip-mania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy. Cornelis yearns for an heir, but so far he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. But as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia’s likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between the beautiful young wife and the talented artist.
The Sandvoorts’ servant, Maria, is having a child by a man who, thinking himself betrayed by her, has run off and joined the navy. Meanwhile,the infatuated couple formulate a plot, one that depends on getting together a great deal of money in a short time. The characters become embroiled in frenzied speculation in the value of new and rare breeds of tulip bulbs, which in real history was a time of stunning economic lunacy; when a single Semper Augustus bulb could be sold for “six fine horses, three oxheads of wine, a dozen sheep, two dozen silver goblets and a seascape by Esaias van de Velde.”
