THE JOURNAL OF MADAME GIOVANNI—Alexandra Dumas—Liveright ($3).
Readers of two of the most readable books ever written—The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—had an unusual experience this week. Seventy-three years after the death of Alexandre Dumas, his Journal of Madame Giovanni was translated for the first time into English, published for the first time in the U.S. Publishers were charmed by its vague topicality and timeliness (most of the action takes place in the South Pacific and San Francisco). Dumas fans, and readers (if such there be) who have never read a line of Dumas, may well be charmed by the fact that The Journal of Madame Giovanni, while no Three Musketeers, is more exciting, vivid, tantalizingly rambling than any romance of like kidney turned out today.
The Journal of Madame Giovanni is loaded to the gunwales. The decks are awash. It has everything in its 380 pages, including several earthquakes. Much of it is given over to an exact, sharp-eyed observation of life in the South Sea Islands, California and Mexico, in the decade 1844-54. The observer is Madame Giovanni, 20 when the story opens, slender, beautiful, and a bride. The combination of her loves and adventures, and the businesslike noting of contemporary facts, alternate with the billowy relaxations of Mme. Giovanni's feminine wiles.
Ruin and Rascality. High point of Mme. Giovanni's romantic island-hopping came when she hopped to North America. When the Giovannis got to San Francisco, the gold rush was on. The hundred tons of sweet potatoes, onions and apples that the Giovannis carried for sale—a total investment of $13,000—were almost worth their weight in gold. A speculator offered M. Giovanni almost half a million dollars for the cargo. He held out for more, could not get it unloaded. He finally had to take $2,500 for his half-rotten produce. The Giovannis were ruined. So they opened a furniture store with Mme. Giovanni's belongings. As it was beginning to prosper, an Irishman and friend appeared, wanted to see Mme. Giovanni, and laughed loudly when Giovanni told them that the lady was his wife. "Behold the rascal," they cried, "who allows himself to have a wife entirely to himself in San Francisco!", Then one put his hand on his revolver and said: "We want to see her!" One Irishman shot Giovanni through the shoulder while the other drove a knife into his thigh. Giovanni blew out one man's brains. The other ran.
"Mr. Giovanni pulled the corpse of the American outside his shop, placing it near the threshold of his door. ... No charges were made against Mr. Giovanni," says his wife, primly; "such scenes were not extraordinary."
Not the Giovannis' impromptu adventures, but the author's inexhaustible narrative gusto describing them, make this novel standard Dumas.
The Author. Few of Dumas' novels were more fantastic than his life and ancestry. His father, the mulatto son of one of his grandfather's Santo Domingo slaves, enlisted in King Louis XVI's army as a private. During the Revolution he rose from private to commander in 20 months.