... as Anne Goldgar gently informs us at the beginning of her absorbing book [TulipMania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age], most of what we "know" about tulip mania is pure fiction, borrowed wholesale from a Dutch satire called Dialogue between True-Mouth and Greedy-Goods, penned by one Adriaen Roman in 1637, at the very moment when the bubble burst. By comparing the assertions of True-Mouth and Greedy-Goods with surviving archival records in Haarlem, Utrecht, and Amsterdam, Goldgar has discovered that most of the tulip merchants who were active in 1637 continued to trade long after the February crash. The real long-term effect of the crisis, then, was more practical than dramatic: by setting a more reasonable range for tulip prices, it actually stabilized a market that thrives with no less vigor today.

As the satirists realized in the late winter of 1637, tulip mania provided a suggestive image of the Netherlands in an age when expanding commerce had brought unprecedented prosperity. Stern, patient practicality had wrested the country's fields and cities piece by piece from the grip of the sea, and although the qualities of persistence and frugality still dominated Dutch society, sophisticated new tastes had also emerged along with the new temptations. Only in this rarefied Golden Age could an object that looked for all the world like an onion have been traded for such dizzying sums of money, all for the none-too-secure hope that a dry brown bulb would one day burst into a flower as ephemeral as it was glorious.