Anton had pleaded poverty. Levitan and Kundasova believed him. Levitan spoke to Morozov, Kundasova to Barskov, editor of Children's Leisure. They told the tycoons their duty: each to advance Chekhov 2000 roubles. Accepting only Suvorin's money, Anton left Melikhovo
MAY-AUGUST 1897
at 8.00 a.m. on Sunday 31 August. Olga Kundasova saw him off. Masha followed him to Moscow, where Lika intercepted him with a note: 'I'll fetch you by cab between 9 and 9.30 - not too late for supper, I think. I badly want and need to see you. Where are you going? Abroad?' The next day Anton left Moscow for Biarritz, after a last meeting with Lika, to which neither of them ever later referred.
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SIXTY TWO
ô Promenades September-October 1897 Two OLD Taganrog boys met Anton at the Paris Gare du Nord on 4/16 September 1897: Ivan Pavlovsky, a former revolutionary, now Paris correspondent of New Times, and an engineer, Professor Belel-iubsky. They took Anton to Suvorin's hotel, the Vendome. Suvorin was now in Biarritz, but his son Mikhail, Anna Suvorina and Emilie Bijon lingered in Paris. After sixty hours in a carriage, choked by the cigars of his German companions, Anton took the air. He had a haemorrhage: Anna Suvorina found out and wrote to Aleksandr. After four days, Anton followed Suvorin's tracks to Biarritz, but Suvorin had already left for his theatre in Petersburg. He promised to see Anton in France in October.
In Biarritz, too, Chekhov was met by friends (and wind and rain). Vasili Sobolevsky, editor of The Russian Gazette, his partner, Varvara Morozova, their three children and a governess, were on holiday there. Chekhov liked their menage. They offered him a room, but he stayed in the Hotel Victoria. Biarritz, Russians complained, was crowded with Russians. Anton told Suvorin on 11/23 September: The plage is interesting; the crowd is good when they are doing nothing on the sands. I stroll, listen to blind musicians; yesterday I went to Bayonne and saw La belle He'lene at the Casino… For 14 francs I have a room on the first floor, service and everything… Poliakov [the railway magnate] and his family are here. Help! There are very many Russians. The women are just about tolerable, but the old and young Russian men have little faces like ferrets and are all shorter than average. The old Russian men are pale, obviously exhausted at night by the cocottes; for anyone with impotence can only end up exhausted. The cocottes here are vile, greedy, all out in the open - and it is hard for a respectable family man who has come here to rest from his labours to restrain himself and not be naughty. Poliakov is pale.
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1897
The Atlantic gales limited Anton's stay to a fortnight. He too fell for I Biarritz cocotte: Margot, aged nineteen, promised to follow when he moved.
Anton had advances from Suvorin, from Adolf Marx of The Cornfield, from Goltsev of Russian Thought and from Sobolevsky. Fiodor Batiushkov, the Russian editor of a new international magazine, (j)smopolis, had commissioned a story, but Anton did not feel like writing. The President of France had visited Russia in August 1897: a clause in the new Franco-Russian alliance forbade the French post to accept packages printed in Cyrillic, to protect Russia from seditious literature. Anything that Chekhov wrote or proof-read had to be a letter on thin paper. For months his creative outlet was a notebook in which fragments of dialogue, characterization and plot were mingled with addresses and lists of plants for the garden. On its blank pages Tania Shchepkina Kupernik had written 'Darling Antosha, the Great Moscow Hotel is a haven of bliss' and 'Mio caro, io t'amo'.
Letters to Biarritz encouraged Chekhov to idle and rest. Masha wrote: 'Just remember why you went to warm regions and don't let town life tempt you too much, my girlfriends and yours have asked me to tell you. Levitan is, he says, very ill again, tomorrow I mean to see him.' The Suvorins were returning to Russia. Emilie Bijon had gone to Brumath in Alsace to see her son Jean. She wrote to Anton after receiving his letter in French: 'Votre photographie est sur ma table, tout en vous ecrivant il me semble vous parler et que vous m'ecoutiez attentivement, et parfois un petit sourire. Un mot de vous fera mon bonheur.' Lika first wrote on 12 September: I have been thinking recently about your affair with the lady writer and here is what I have come up with: a man has been eating and eating delicious refined dishes and he was fed up with everything and longed for a radish… I as usual am thinking about you, so everything is in the old rut. But there is some news: Tania Shchep-kina-Kupernik has come back to Moscow, looking more beautiful and her face has even more of the Reinheit which you prize in women and which Mme lust has so much of… Anyway I'm not envious of her, she's very nice and interesting. Anton offered to go to Paris to meet Lika's train if she came. As for insisting on Reinheit in women, he protested that he also valued
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FLOWERING CI Ml I FRIES kindness, her virtue. Anton told her that Margot in Biarritz was providing him with French lessons. Lika was seeking money to 'throw herself on Anton's neck' by mortgaging her share of the family land. Olga Kundasova and Lika now strolled the streets of Moscow together. As Olga counted the men who turned to look at them, she, with her six years' extra experience, helped Lika to reach a conclusion on 5 October: I hope Margot stirs you up properly and wakes up the qualities which have been dormant so long. Suppose you came back to Russia not a sour-puss but a live human being, a man! What will happen then! Masha's poor girlfriends!… you know nothing about cheese and even when you're hungry you like just to look at it from a safe distance, not to eat it… If you keep on like this with Margot, then I am very sorry for her, then tell her that her colleague in misfortune sends her regards! I once stupidly played the part of tiie cheese which you refused to eat. Once again, Anton was without his pince-nez in Europe. He asked Masha to send Dr Radzwicki's prescription on his desk; she sent the first Latin writing she saw, a chemist's prescription. Anton strolled the beaches, formally dressed, charming Sobolevsky's little girls, while their father, looking like Petronius, bathed. Myopia made it hard to avoid encounters. On Anton's last three days in Biarritz he bumped into Leikin, whose diary for 20 September/2 October notes: 'I see Chekhov coming up to me… he is not bathing here, just enjoying the sea air. I think he is completely recovered. He climbed up the steep cliff from the sea with us and there was no sign of his being out of breath.'
On 22 September/4 October Anton and Sobolevsky left together for Nice via Toulouse. On the Cote d'Azur they settled into a hotel Leikin had recommended, La Pension Russe on the Rue Gounod, then a stinking alley that ran from the station to the Promenade des Anglais. Its attraction, apart from cheapness, was its Russian owner (a Mme Vera Kruglopoleva). The Russian cook was a former serf who had stayed in France thirty years ago when her owners returned to Russia, and now occasionally made the borshch or shchi her guests pined for. She lent the pension mystery: she was married to a negro sailor and had a mulatto daughter, Sonia, who was seen at night as she plied her trade on Nice's streets. Anton had told his family that
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1897
he would spend only October in Nice, but the autumn weather was too fine to leave. The Russian company was much to his liking: the dead as well as the living. At Caucade, in the west of Nice, lay the cemeteries, the Orthodox graveyard being at the very top of the hill, closest to heaven, with the best view of the sea. Here lay exiled revolutionaries, wounded officers, consumptive aristocrats, doctors and priests who had ministered to expatriate Russians, surrounded by hibiscus, palms and bougainvillaea. For the living, there were two churches, a reading room, and Russian lawyers and doctors.