Nice struck him on arrival as a vacationer's paradise. Flowers and
1 In short, Chekhov was paying about fourteen dollars a week for board and room, and the roubles his bachelor existence would require for a year would amount to about $12 50-$! 500.
greenery were everywhere — palms, eucalyptuses, oleanders — and from the crowded Promenade des Anglais stretched the lovely view of the caressing and tender sea. But most important was the precious sun that shone for days on end, so that into late fall Chekhov walked about without an overcoat and in a straw hat. This was the kind of life that warmed his soul. He loved the street noises and the vagabond musicians, who often performed under his window and for whom he always had coins ready — the tenor in one group, he wrote Alexander, was more talented than the best artist in Russian opera who received five hundred roubles a month. Then there were the cafcs, and the bands marching in musical competition along the streets, which were full of excitement, dancing and merriment. In contrast to Russian social manners, the French sense of equality and their delicacy in conversation won his admiration. It amazed him to watch a group of schoolboys at play, their priest joining in with as much gusto as the youngsters. A servant at the pension, in performing tasks for him, would smile like a duchess on the stage, although he could see from her face that she was weary from hard work. And the polite form of address of clerks, gendarmes, even beggars, impressed him. "Culture here," he wrote Suvorin's wife, "oozes out of every shop window, every willow basket; every dog has the odor of civilization." If he remained alive, he promised, he would spend every winter abroad. His only chauvinistic strictures were that the sugar, matches, shoes and apothecary shops were incomparably better in Russia.
With some resistance at first, Chekhov eventually settled down to the narrowly circumscribed life of the pension dweller. There were about forty in the Pension Russe, mostly women, Russian provincials of small means, a few lawyers and academicians, and a titled lady with an old maid daughter. They came and went, and Chekhov regarded with a sinking feeling the departure of an occasional boarder he liked, whose place was taken by a dull guest. A number of them, like himself, were in various stages of illness. An irascible widow of a distinguished scholar, who sat next to him at the long pension table, seemed constantly angry; she believed that he deliberately took from the serving plate precisely the piece of meat or fish which she wanted. The fat old wife of a Moscow merchant was chronically dissatisfied, never went anywhere, and sat in lonely misery all day in the garden, dreaming of returning to Russia. Chekhov pitied her, for he found out that friends had abandoned her and she was afraid to travel home alone. The baroness and her daughter, long-nosed, severe, dressed fashionably but in poor taste, chattered constantly at the dinner table above the heads of their neighbors. Alexandra Khotyaintseva, whom Chekhov had persuaded to make a trip from Paris to visit him, drew an amusing set of imaginary caricatures which portrayed him pursuing and offering a proposal of marriage to the young baroness. Alexandra broke the pension rule by insisting on having tea with Chekhov in his room. She recalls in her memoirs that a Kiev couple, in the next room, were reading one of his tales aloud to each other and he put his ear to the wall to find out which one it was, a situation which the artist also caught in a deft caricature.
For the most part Chekhov found the pension ladies foolish, small- minded gossips, everlastingly speaking nonsense and banalities, and it was hard to restrain himself from answering their queries impertinently. "I regard these Russian ladies in the Pension Russe," he wrote Suvorin, "as ugly, dull, idle, selfishly idle, and I fear to become like them for it seems to me that to be doctored, as we here are doctored (that is, I and these ladies), is a form of the most repulsive egoism." (December 14, 1897.)
His defense was to develop a daily regimen of his own, consistent with the prescriptions of his doctors — indoors in inclement weather, no liquor, no spicy foods, and no fast walking. In the bright, sunny mornings he strolled along the Promenade des Anglais, and then sat in the shade to read. In the late afternoon and evening he remained in his room and read or tried to write. The study of French occupied him seriously and he took lessons. It was difficult, he remarked, for a man of his age to learn a foreign language, but his progress is indicated by several long letters to Masha, who was also studying French, in which he explained fine points of the language. He clearly learned to read French with some ease and wrote it after a fashion — a letter to the French governess in the Suvorin family elicited praise. But he spoke it haltingly and found it hard to understand Frenchmen when they carried on conversations among themselves.
Chekhov, however, soon sacrificed his daily regimen to the demands of the little band of loyal friends he made at Nice. Sobolevsky introduced him to Professor M. M. Kovalevsky, to whom he became quite attached. He had a villa at Beaulieu, a few miles from the city, and at this time was preparing a series of lectures to be delivered in Paris. A lawyer, historian, and sociologist, in 1887 Kovalevsky had been deprived of his professorship in Moscow University because of his political views and had emigrated to Paris, where he eventually founded the Russian Advanced School of Social Science. A story about him, which Chekhov fancied, was that he had once fallen in love with his namesake, Sofya Kovalevskaya, the eminent mathematician, who as a little girl had watched spellbound the courtship of her older sister by Dostoevsky. A huge, vital man, witty, vivacious, and fun-loving, he won Chekhov as much by these qualities as by his vast learning and incisive mind — more impressive, Chekhov told Suvorin, than the minds of the best intellectuals in Petersburg. Chekhov eagerly accepted Kovalevsky's invitation to accompany him on a trip to Algeria in January, after he finished his Paris lectures.
A sharp contrast to Kovalevsky was the well-known painter of historical scenes, V. I. Yakobi, whose splenetic temperament found an outlet in scolding everyone as swindlers and scoundrels, a foible which amused Chekhov. And the gentle, shy, but keen-minded old Russian vice consul, N. I. Yurasov, was a favorite of all three, and a friend frequently helpful to Chekhov in many ways. Chekhov took walks or played piquet with one of the other of these friends, and they would often dine together at the pension or at the Taverne Gotique, where he would permit himself oysters and beer.
Chekhov had other friends and acquaintances at Nice whom he saw from time to time, such as the bacteriologist, Dr. V. G. Valter, and he visited the officials at the Russian zoological station at Villefranche. On several occasions, despite his own illness, he performed medical services for distressed Russians, one of whom presented him with a traveling cooking kit as a remuneration. When the regular Nice "season" began, in late October — inaugurated by a visit of Queen Victoria — multitudes of people of all nationalities swarmed into the resort, including among the many Russians his old friends the Nemirovich-Danchenko brothers. The carnival spirit affected Chekhov and he wrote Sobolevsky for a correspondent's card in order to receive good seats at the various performances, such as those of Sarah Bernhardt and the famous soprano Adelina Patti.