But the train speeds off into the distance, taking with it her brief illusion of happiness. Marya Vasihevna is forced once aga;n to confront the reality of her 'dull, difficult' existence, 'lacking in kindness, caring friends and interesting acquaintances', and reflected even in her dreams, which only ever seem to be about exams, peasants and snowdrifts. Chekhov found t eaner to write from memory. In response to a commission from an international journal in St Petersburg for a suitably 'international' s^ory set on the Cote d'Azur, he replied that he would only be able to write about h s current surroundings when he was back in Russia. It was necessary for his memory to filter the subject first, he explained, so that only what was important or typical was left behind.15 After breakfast each day, Chekhov liked to walk down to the Promenade des Anglais and sit reading the newspapers or just gaze out to the soft blue sea in the curving Baie des Anges. Like the city's eucalyptus trees brought from Australia, the palm trees in whose shade he sat had actually been imported in the 1860s when Nice was first developed as a resort. Chekhov was something of a Russian newspaper fanatic, and confessed to being bored without them when he first arrived.16 Soon he was receiving copies of Russian Gazette from the editor in Moscow, as well as Russian Word, The Courier and New Times from Petersburg, which he would then forward to his friend the Russian Vice-Consul. His father, meanwhile, started sending him regular bundles of issues of other newspapers, including the local Taganrog paper. When his French improved and the Dreyfus scandal was at its height, Chekhov also started devouring he Figaro, L'Aurore, La Parole Itbre and other French newspapers. His other obsession was correspondence, and the fr :nds who came to visit him could not help noticing that he received a lot of letters. Chekhov may have been a private and guatded person who kept people at arm's length, but he nevertheless needed to be able to keep them within reach. A week into his stay in Nice, a month after leaving Moscow, he was pining for letters from home, and said as much to Suvor n. In letter after letter written in his first weeks away, he carefully spelled out 'France, Nice, Pension Russe, a Monsieur Antoine Tchekhoff' to ensure that people knew his address and that envelopes addressed to him by his correspondents did not go astray. 'I'm going to be here a long time,' he wrote in one of his first letters, to his cousin Georgi :n Taganrog; 'it's boiing witnout letters, and if you keep your promise '.e. write and tell me what is going on in Taganrog, I'll be very grateful.'17
Eventually Chekhov began to receive replies to the many letters he was sending, and wrote back in ebullient form about his first impressions of Nice, the people he had met and his day trips by train up the coast: to BeauLeu to ■ .sit Maxim Kovalevsky, to Villefranche where there was an interesting Russian zoological station, and to Monte Carlo where theie was the famous casino And he had not coughed up blood once, he told his sister exultantly on 15 October, three weeks after his arrival; h;s friends were coughing much more than he was, and medical advice was that he could do anything but go to Pans in November when it was damp and snowy, He had seen the King of Siam, there was greenery all around, the chambermaid smiled at him all the time, he had discovered mosquito repellent so was sleeping better, the sky was always blue, and he had even started writing a new story.18
It is unlikely Chekhov would have wanted to go to the races or attend black tie dinners even if he had felt completely well (one senses that his excuse for refusing one such 'nvitation on the grounds that he did not have a dinner jacket was a convenient one). The nearest he came to the world of high society was catching sight of Queen Victoria one spring day while out on his daily walk. 9 The doughty British sovereign had been enjoying T7iMts to the French Riviera since 1882, and between 1895 and 1899 she made annual winter visits to Nice, which served to Dring even more visitors to the area. In March 1897 she and her retinue of a hundred staff arrived to take over the entire west wing of the brand new Excelsior Hotel Regina, wh";h had been specially built for her (the enormous belle epoque edifice, up on the hill above the city in Cimiez, was where Matisse settled after the war). The Queen liked со go for afternoon drives in her carriage, and each year she was brought down to the Promenade des Angk :s to view a parade of French soldiers. Perhaps Chekhov got hit by a carnation during the so-called 'Battle of the Flowers', wlr :h ensued when the Queen amused herself by throwing flowers at the young army officers.20
II
The Pension Russe
Yesterday I had blini at our Vice-Consul Yurasov's house.
Letter to Olga Knipper, Nice, 2 January 1901
Chekhov's residence in Nice was a spacious south-facing room with shutters, a grand Cleopatra-style bed and an en suite bathroom, on the top floor of the Pension Russe, a modest three-storey hotel set deep in a courtyard on the Rue Gounod and surrounded by a lush garden. There was a carpet and a fireplace in h;s room, but it was usually so warm he kept his windows wide open, and then found it difficult to work with the sun stream1 ng in and the birds singing in the trees, enticing him outside.21 Along with the problem of his faltering health, the copious meals every day also made him drowsy. He once told a friend that when he was writing he preferred to stick to a diet of coffee and bouillon: he disliked working on a full stomach. There was also the challenge of writing in a hotel room at an unfamiliar desk. He confided to his sister that it was sheer misery trying to work away from home - like sitting at someone else's sewing machine, or, worse, being hung from one leg upside down.22 Eventually he came to the conclusion that Russians were constitutionally ticapable of working unless the weather was bad. Ana the musicians who wandered into the courtyard with cheir mandolins, violins and guitars to give impromptu concerts under his windows every mornng also provided a distraction, albeit sometimes a pleasant one. Chekhov decided that the street singers of Nice who performed arias for a handful of centimes were actually better than the stars at Moscow's second opera company, whose earnings ran into hundreds of roubles. He was becoming gradually convinced', he wrote4 to his sister, that Russians were not really born to be opera singers. Maybe they were capable of producing some great bass voices (the legacy of centuries of unaccompanied Orthodox chant), but he felt that they should stick to doing business, writing and tilling fields instead of gomg to Milan.23
The Pension Russe may have attracted more than its share of itinerant musicians in Nice, being located, as its street address suggests, in the bohemian musicians' quarter, which features, among others, a Rue J. Offenbach and a Rue Pagarnn. (the great violinist died of tuberculosis in Nice in 1840). The Rue Gounod, which runs south towards the sea, was also in the heart of the Russ'an quarter of Nice: the Pension Russe was close to the Church of Saints Nicholas and Alexandra, and the Russian Consulate was around the corner on the Rue Rossini.24 Located a few minutes' walk from the railway station, then still surrounded by gardens at the edge of the city, it was not the most salubrious part of town. Due to the soot and noise produced by the trains, the city's investors had been adamant that the railway station should not be built in close proxim, .y to the mam hotels and pedestrian areas; however, not everyone could afford to stay there. As one wag commented, to live in Nice it was no longer enough to be a consumptive - a poitrinaire - one had to be a millionaire.15 In the 1890s at least, the Rue Gounod was a distinctly malodorous street, too narrow for carriages to drive down Chekhov told one of his correspondents that respectable ladies refused to live there because they would be too ashamed to invite the<r friends to such a seedy part of town.26