Florence Naugrette examines the genesis and legacy of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated movement, romanticism. Whereas romanticism is often susceptible to being cast at the opposite end of the spectrum to classicism, Naugrette argues that it took its cues from wherever it could find them: the noble classical and neoclassical genres of tragedy and comedy; opera and comic opera; the Elizabethans; bourgeois drama; and popular genres including pantomime, féerie and above all melodrama. Romantic theatre thus appeared in all registers from comic to tragic, realist to fantastical. Naugrette also dispels the myth that Victor Hugo and his best known contemporaries Dumas, Vigny and Musset, all consecrated by posterity, were romantic theatre’s sole figureheads. She affords due credit to a host of other playwrights who contributed to the movement, notably women such as George Sand, Virginie Ancelot and Delphine de Girardin; and offers visibility to the actors and actresses who contributed to the success of the romantic theatre not only by playing its characters but also by inspiring playwrights and inventing new acting methods. Naugrette concludes by positing that French romanticism, originating predominantly in the French Revolution’s ethos of democratization, was also a nascent form of national popular theatre.

We have reached the end of our stroll. We find ourselves in the company of Alexandre Dumas who, in 1850, wrote “The Black Tulip”. In it, he combines the stories of the tulip mania in the Netherlands with the tragic story of the brothers de Witt. In our final example of “About the data” we reconstruct the historic trading data of tulip bulbs, which turns out to be a detective story in its own right. Prices for tulip bulbs crashed on February 3, 1637. We also include the story of the growing of the first black tulip in 1986. Johan de Witt was tragically lynched by a politically motivated mob on August 20, 1672. With him, we meet a politician who, through his mathematical training, was able to solve an important problem from the realm of life insurance risk, the pricing of annuities. His publication “Waerdye” is our final example on risk communication. We leave the closing lines of our book to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who spoke the following words to Horatio “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We hope that we were able to convince you that these words very much apply to the realm of risk.

The use of the present tense to refer to past events may depend on two conceptual scenarios. First, the speaker may be mentally displaced to the past. Second, the speaker may pretend that the past events are currently accessible in the form of a representation. This 'representation' scenario is generally the most economic conceptual explanation for the use of the present tense to refer past events. Examples are discussed to illustrate the argument: passages from the novels of Alexandre Dumas and from Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's schooldays; narratives accompanying security camera footage; a narrative by a character in an episode of Seinfeld; and passages from Thucydides. In all these cases the use of the present tense to refer to past events can be made sense of in terms of a conceptual representation scenario, where the difference lies in the exact nature of the representation. The more concrete the representation, the stronger the tendency for the speaker to use the present tense to designate the described events.