Dumas Returns

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.

He had a chocolaty skin, soft negroid eyes, feminine hands. But he could raise four army muskets by inserting his fingers into the muzzles. In one Austrian battle he defended a bridge so fiercely that thereafter he was called "Horatius Codes of the Tyrol." Said admiring General Thiebault: "He is the only colored man whom I have forgiven his skin."

"I'll be ruined," cried Alexandre Dumas' mother just before his birth. But he had fair skin and hair (which later became kinky), blue eyes. As a boy he had a hard time learning the alphabet, but he wrote beautiful longhand. Said his mother: "Every idiot can write well!"

Soon young Alexandra's penmanship was supporting himself, the first of a long succession of mistresses and the best known of his various illegitimate children--Alexandre Dumas fils. Dumas was also trying to eke out his earnings by playwriting. Whenever the baby howled too long, Dumas slammed the future author of The Lady of the Camellias against the bed. "I can still see myself in the air," Dumas fils used to say with a shiver years later.

"The Crown Is Mine." "Melpomene and Thalia have been surpassed," cried the Romantics when Dumas' play Henri III was first presented. Pandemonium broke loose. The audience "stood up, as if seized with madness." "The crown is mine," cried Dumas, and bought himself chromatic waistcoats and a pince-nez dangling from a black ribbon.

The Revolution of 1830 momentarily interrupted his dramatic career. Dumas was about to start south with his latest mistress when news that street fighting had begun in Paris filled him with joy. He volunteered to go to Soissons, seize some badly needed powder. The commander of the arsenal, a former colonial officer, at first refused to surrender to the kinky-haired playwright. But the officer's wife cried: "Oh, my darling, yield! This is another revolt of the Negroes!" Dumas brought back the powder to Paris, was embraced by Lafayette and the Duke of Orleans, who said: "M. Dumas, you have just achieved your finest drama."

It was followed by Dumas' Anthony, a more sensational success than Henri III. Paris was ravished by Anthony's closing speech: "She resisted me. I have assassinated her."

Private Life, Public Saturnalia. Dumas' private life became a public saturnalia of love affairs, gargantuan gastronomy, successes in the theater, speculations on the Bourse, financial crashes, perpetual indebtedness from which he sometimes escaped by travels that took him to Russia, Transcaucasia, Africa.

One day Poet Gerard de Nerval sent a friend to Dumas. His name was Auguste Maquet. He brought Dumas a rough draft of an historical novel, soon published in two volumes as Le Bonhomme Buvat by Alexandre Dumas. Said Dumas: "The two most amusing volumes I have ever written." Maquet's name did not appear on the books. He got about $200.

In 1844 Maquet brought Dumas the rough draft of a novel about a Guardsman named D'Artagnan. The Three Musketeers had been born.

Hammer Away. Thereafter Maquet could not supply rough copy to Dumas fest enough. "Some copy, as fast as possible," Dumas wrote, "even if it's only a dozen pages. . . . Hammer away, hammer away. . . . I'm completely dried up." Dumas himself embellished Maquet's plots, dubbed in episodes, invented complications.

History as truth interested Dumas, but did not constrain him. "It is permissible to violate history," he said, "on condition that you have a child by her." When people asked him how he produced such a never-ending succession of novels, plays, stories, Dumas said: "Ask a plum tree how it produces plums."

But the fruitful collaboration was broken up at last. Enemies made trouble. Maquet went into business for himself, prospered nicely while Dumas squandered fortunes. Dumas missed his second brain. "There would be forty fine stories more," he once sighed, "if the best, the firmest, and the most productive friendship that ever existed had not been broken by the tittle-tattle of false friends."

Toward the end of Dumas' life his son once found him reading The Three Musketeers. Said the old man: "I always promised myself to read it when I grew old, to see for myself what it is worth." "What do you think of it?" "It's good."

In 1870, Dumas died at Dieppe. That night the Germans occupied the town.

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