Apparently it took experience some time to teach the two gamblers that they would never discover a magic secret for breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. In the end Potapenko had to borrow money from Chekhov to return to Petersburg. Chekhov gambled only very small sums, winning and losing, but he had the will power to stop, Potapenko admits, and once having taken his decision, he would not return to the gaming tables. A more logical explanation was one Chekhov himself gave— the realization that with his poor health gambling quickly exhausted him physically and he resolved to abandon it.
Meanwhile the artist Braz arrived in Nice to try a second portrait of Chekhov, for the wealthy collector Tretyakov had agreed to financc the painter's trip there for this purpose. For days again Chekhov posed for the painstaking Braz; though the results this time pleased the artist and Tretyakov, and ultimately became the writer's most popular portrait, Chekhov never liked it. While the painting was in progress, he wrote Alexandra Khotyaintseva that viewers agreed that his face and nccktie were very lifelike, and that his expression, as in the first effort, suggested that he was sniffing horseradish. After Braz finished the portrait, Chekhov condemned it in more forthright terms for its photographic quality and its failure to embody anything of his own inner essence:
. . if I have become a pessimist and write gloomy talcs, the fault is in this portrait of mc."
Despite the presence of friends, amusements, and the exhilarating early spring weather of Nice, Chekhov had begun to chafe as his stay there dragged on. As he had told Suvorin earlier: "I do nothing, only sleep, eat, and offer sacrifices to the Goddess of Love . . . but I've already grown weary of all this and want to go home." (January 27, 1898.) A major cause of his restlessness was an inability to work consistently; a Russian author, he now quixotically dccided, needed bad weather to write. He had promised Russian News a short tale a month, had been dissatisfied with the three he wrote, and gave up any hope of fulfilling his agreement. Having taken an advancc from Cosmopolis, he forced a story from himself, Visiting with Friends,5 which he recognized as a limp performance and later excluded from the first collected edition of his works. Repeatedly he had to offer embarrassing excuses to Russian Thought for his failure to finish the long story he had agreed to send them. If only he were home in his little Lodge, he thought, how easily this writing would go.
By February he had begun to think of spring at Melikhovo. The problem was entirely one of weather. Anxiously he asked Masha to inform him as soon as the snow was out of the woods and the road from Lopasnya to Melikhovo was passable. His health had been fine, but toward the end of the month he informed Misha — in a letter sent to congratulate him and his wife on the birth of their first child, a girl — that a dentist had broken one of his teeth and that it had taken three sessions to extract it. Infection set in with high fever, which had him crawling up the wall in pain, and an operation had to be performed on his jaw. . . .
In March Chekhov began hopefully bombarding his sister with instructions on spring needs for the pond, the garden, and on what supplies to lay in. He asked about Lika, wondering at her long silence — and perhaps worrying over whether Masha had passed on to her a comment in one of his earlier letters: "What about Lika and her shop? She'll sputter at her own workers, for she really has a frightful temper. Added to this, she has a weakness for green and yellow ribbons and enormous hats, and with such drawbacks in elegance, it is impossible to be a legislatress of fashion and taste." However, he thoughtfully
5 Published in Cosmopolis, February 1898.
added a footnote to this: "But I'm not against her opening a millinery shop. Whatever it may be, it is work." (January 9,1898.)
When Masha, who was perhaps more concerned about her brother's health than he himself, reported in early April that the weather was still unfavorable for his return, Chekhov, unwilling to remain in Nice any longer after a stay of almost eight months, decided to go to Paris and await there his sister's call home. He wrote Alexandra Khotyaintseva to meet him at the station and left for Paris on April 14. A few weeks before, he had broken his long silence with a brief note to Suvorin to ask for the annual accounting on the sale of his books. An answer informing him that he expected to be in Paris elicited a prompt and friendly response from Chekhov: "Wire me the day and hour of your arrival . . . and I'll meet you at the station. I've accumulated a mass of all sorts of things — both feelings and thoughts — to discuss with you. . . . We'll return to Russia from Paris together." (April 6, 1898.) And when Suvorin came Chekhov left his cheap hotel to stay with him at the expensive Vendome. With his forgiving nature, Chekhov disliked quarrels and hard feelings, and though their falling-out over the Dreyfus case irreparably damaged their intimate relationship, neither wanted to be on unfriendly terms with the other.
In Suvorin's company Chekhov made the rounds of distinguished Russians in Paris. Suvorin noted in his diary that they dined with the well-known art collector Shchukin. One of the guests, A. F. Onegin, asked Chekhov to write in his album, which was arranged in the form of a calendar, with a printed epigraph at the head of each page. Under an epigraph taken from a poem of Lermontov . . .
Believe me — happiness is there only
Where we are loved, where we are believed . . .
he wrote, having underscored the second line of the epigraph: "Where we are loved, where we are believed, there it is dull for us; but we are happy there where we ourselves love and where we ourselves believe," and he signed his name.
Chekhov may have found it more interesting, as he indicated in his own diary, to be introduced by Kovalevsky, who had lived in Paris for years, to some of his French friends, including the brother of Dreyfus and Bernard Lazare, who presented him with a copy of his brochure that had been instrumental in reopening the case of Dreyfus. He also saw something of the bohemian group of artists among whom Alexandra
Khotyaintseva lived, and he visited the theater and exhibitions of sculpture and painting. However, much of his brief stay was devoted to the business of his native town. In Nice he had bought and made a gift to the Taganrog library of three hundred and nineteen volumes of the French classics, and now in Paris he gathered together for it an excellent collection of printed material on the Dreyfus case. Further, he persuaded the eminent Russian sculptor M. M. Antokolsky to present to Taganrog a statue of Peter the Great, which he had modeled, for the town's bicentennial celebration. And learning that the dream of his old Taganrog teacher Pokrovsky was to obtain a Bulgarian order, for his participation in the Russo-Turkish War, Chekhov sought the assistance of influential government friends to bring this about.
Eventually the lovely spring weather of Paris turned rainy and Chekhov was surprised that the dampness seemed to have no deleterious effect on his health. He was sitting there, he wrote Masha, waiting for her wire, for he wanted to leave and was weary of chattering to no purpose with so many people. Finally, word came that the weather was fine at Melikhovo. Loaded down with presents for friends and all the family, on May 2 he joyfully set out on the Nord Express for Petersburg. Before leaving he dashed off a note to Alexander: "Shine your shoes, dress up in your best, and come to meet me. Since I'm a rich relative, I suppose I'm right in requiring such etiquette. Tell no one about my arrival." He left Paris alone, without Suvorin.