The death of Pavel Egorovich during Cheknov's first winter n Yalta, coupled with his illness which required long periods spent in a warm Climate, spelled the end of the Melikhovo period in the family's life. The newly widowed Evgenia Yakovlevna had fled Melikhovo following the unexpected death of her husband, and in time would relocate to Yalta to live with her son. Chekhov came back to Melikhovo one last time the following summer, in order to tie up loose ends before the property was put on the market, and to complete the construction of his last school. It was a sombre time, and Chekhov's mood was not helped by the unseasonably cold weather and the demise of his beloved dachshunds (probably suffering from rabies, Brom died in June 1899,77 and Quinine died a few weeks later probably also from rabies, having been bitten by a yard dog).78 The three days in May when Olga Knipper came down from Moscow to stay at Melikhovo were an exception, however. Although we have no record of how they spent their time, it is safe to say that Olga Leonardovna and Anton Pavlovich cemented their friendship during her stay; their correspondence began soon after she left. A romance soon blossomed.
Chapter 8
A SEASON ON THE COTE D'AZUR
I
Nostalgia in Mice
I'd be sitting by an open window in the evening, you know, all on my own, and music would start playing and I'd suddenly get so homesick, and I think I would have given anything just to go home . . .
The Bishop
The severe haemorrhaging from his lungs, which occurred in March 1897, forced Chekhov to face up to the fact that he was definitely suffering from tuberculosis. Suvorin had come to Moscow from St Petersburg for a few days and Chekhov caught the train up from Melikhovo to join him for a Saturday night dinner at the Hermitage, which was still his favourite restaurant. But just after they had sat down at their table, blood suddenly started pouring out of Chekhov's mouth. All he had managed to order before being hurried away in a sleigh back to Suvorin's hotel was ice. Chekhov was understandably very scared. His brother and aunt had both died from tuberculosis in the last ten years, and he interpreted it as an ominous sign that he too was now bleeding from the right lung.
He was nevertheless still unwilling to give in to the idea of being seriously ill. He had been exceptionally busy since the beginning of the year, and early in the morning two days later he discharged himself from Suvorin's hotel before his friend was even up, saying he needed to deal with his correspondence and arrange meetings. But after another haemorrhage at six o'clock the next morning, he was taken by the doctor who had been summoned to his hotel to be treated in a specialist clinic, where he remained for over two weeks. The diagram by his bedshowed his lungs shaded in blue, their upper parts coloured in red. It was in keeping with Chekhov's character to make light of the serious nature of his situation, but his frightened reaction to the news that the ice on the Moscow River had moved is revealing. Peasants he treated for tuberculosis would regularly tell him: 'It won't do any good. I'll go with the spring floods', and he clearly felt this was to be his fate too.
The Hermitage restaurant, Moscow, where Chekhov suffered a haemorrhage in 1897
All around Moscow, the snow was indeed beginning to melt, and it had rained all night the day before Chekhov left Melikhovo. At first he was forbidden to talk but was soon besieged by visitors, who came in pairs and fired questions at him while telling him not to say anything. Tolstoy, who lived nearby, saved Chekhov's energy by doing most of the talking when he came to visit, but their prolonged discussion of immortality one evening provoked another haemorrhage at four in the morning. Eventually Chekhov was allowed to start walking about again, and in thundery weather on Maundy Thursday he was permitted to leave the clinic and return home to Melikhovo in time for Easter.1 His father recorded in his diary on that day that they had eaten radishes and lettuces from the greenhouse. He also noted that ten poplar trees were planted in the garden on the day of his son's return, but made no mention of his illness (the gravity of which Chekhov was anxious toconceal).2 Chekhov now settled down to spend a quiet summer working in his garden, running away from guests, and posing for the portrait commissioned by the Tretyakov Gallery.
The Grand Moscow Hotel, Chekhov's favourite place to stay during hi> visits from Melikhovo
Along with the shock of confronting his mortality in this stark way came the awful realization that he would never be able to spend another winter in Moscow. Thus it was with a heavy heart that he set off for the south of France that autumn, dimly hoping that his health would benefit from the warm climate. Intending со stay abroad until the snow finally melted in Russia the following spring, he boarded the train for Paris at the beginning of September 1897, and a week later be was sitting in bright sunshine in fashionable biarritz, surrounded by Spaniards, poodles, brightly coloured parasols, blind musicians - and lots of well-heeled Russians. The golf course which the British had built a decade earlier (the second oldest on the continent) did not exercise any attraction for Chekhov, but he d'd go on a couple of trips to the nearby Basque town of Bayonne, one of which was to hear a performance of La Belle Helene at the casino there.3 Offenbach's uproarious operetta was the work that had sparked Chekhov's lifelong interest in the theatre, and seeing it now in France must have taken him back to the tiny theatre in Taganrog, which he had first visited when hewas thirteen years old. After two weeks of sitting on the seafront reading newspapers and eating hearty meals, Chekhov'abandoned the blustery Atlantic and its crashing waves for the gentler Mediterranean and moved to Nice, where he ended up staying for the next seven months. It was the longest period he ever spent abroad.
Nice had been officially ceded to France in a mutually advantageous deal struck between Napoleon III and Vittorio Emmanuele II of Savoy in 1860, the year of Chekhov's birth. Since then, with the horrors of che Crimean War quickly receding into the past, Russians had started flocking to Nice in greater numbers. The English had immortalized their presence on the French Riviera in the 1820s by build-.ig the famous Promenade des Anglais along the seafront so that they could indulge their penchant for taking bracing constitutionals,4 and this was where Chekhov also took his daily walks. Once Nice was connected to Paris by rail, wealthy Rus& ans threatened British supremacy on the Cote d'Azur. Alexander II and his retinue arrived just three days after the opening of the ornate Louis XHI-style station in 1865, pre-empting even Napoleon and the Empress Eugenie. Back then the journey took the best part of a day and some Russian aristocrats were known to order the trains to go more slowly so they could get a good night's sleep.5 There were soon over a thousand people arriving each day during the high season.
There was already a sizeable Russan population living in Nice by the time Chekhov arrived in 1897, and the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna felt the little church on the Rue de Longchamps was too small to accommodate the community's burgeoning spiritual needs. After returning home to Petersburg after her w.nter in Nice that spring, she petitioned her son, Nicholas II, to authorize the construction of a much larger place of worsl p. The Cathedra1 of St Nicholas continued to thrive while there were still hundreds of exiled Russian families living in Nice after the Revolution, and nowadays ii is the new wave of wealthy visitors from Russia who have helped make the exotic-look;ng building become one of the most popular tourist attractions on the Riviera. Few visit the old church of Saints Nicholas and Alexandra, but the Russian library housed on the ground floor is open to visitors one day a week. Chekhov did not attend services regularly (if at all) whne he was "ving in Nice, but he came to browse through the books in the library, some of which had been donated by its founder back in 1860. There was also a Russian