Maria kept her brother posted about who of his friends she had seen in Moscow and how much people had liked the stories he had written in Nice, now published, as well as filling \ im in on day-to-day life at Melikhovo. While he was still enjoying sunny weather at the end of October, she wrote to tell him that they had had to cut down trees in the forest to use as fnewoood, and was worried there would not be enough wood to fuel the stoves all winter. Another day she wrote that Anna Petrovna, the old horse they had bought together with the estate, had died; meanwhile, their two remaining horses were no longer capable of working but were eat'ng th^ir valuable bay all the same. Maria also kept her brother informed about the money she was raising to bu Id a ullage school in Melikhovo: she had put by money raised from selling that year's harvest of apples from their orchard, and Levitan had donated a couple of canvases to be auctioned. Chekhov himself donated a thousand roubles when be returned, and the school opened finally in 1899. In December Chekhov asked his sister to buy Christmas presents for the local schoolchildren, and she wrote back to tell him that she had bought calico to make shirts for the sixty boys and nice red scarves for the twenty giils.55
Chekhov did not only issue orders. He also spent time bunting out presents to send back to Russia for his family - French soap and perfume, gloves, umbrellas, Japanese teacups, pencils, scissors, ties, purses, and photographs of himself that he had taken in Nice. In his typically brief diary entry for 21 November, Chekhov's father noted receding a purse from, his son, but did not forget to add "w: hout money'. These items were all transported back to Moscow oy Russians returning home from the Pension Russe The time-honoured tradition of sending things to Russia with people travelling there s thus not merely a recent phenomenon, but it is - and was - sometimes a haphazard business, as emerges from a humorous letter Chekhov sent Maria in December:
Ma chere et bien aimable Marie, if you are brougftt or sent something completely worthless, don't express surprise and say that it was not worth sending such rubbish all those thousands of miles. The fact is that the chance to send things comes very suddenly; you usually find out that someone is going back to Russia by chance and so you send whatever you can manage to g-ab from the desk, like a magnifying glass or a cheap pen ... A certain Miss Zenzinova is going to get in touch with you next week, she is the young daughter of Zenzinov the tea merchant. She is going to bring you somethi.ig, but please don't open the parcel in front of her because she will see that she has brought things which are not valuable all that way and will be offended. The Zenzinovs stayed in the Pension Russe and gave me tea n the evening ... Be friendly to the girl, i.e., thank her for the hospitality which I received from her parents in Nice, say a couple of nice things to her and her Papa will give you 1/4 pound of tea for your trouble.
Put the magnifying glass on my desk.56
By the end of March 1898, knowing that this was the i.me for his flowers to spring up again, Chekhov was longing to be back home looking after his garden. He wrote to Maria to ask her to put canes by the Llies and peon es so that they did not get trodden on. 'We've got two lilies,' he reminded her, 'one in front of your window and the other near the white rose, on the way to the narcissi.' He was also concerned about his roses. 'Don't prune the roses before I return,' he wrote a little later, 'just cut otf the stems wh'ch have gone mouldy over the winter or aren't looking healthy; but be careful when you cut them, and bear in mind that some unhealthy-)ooKng stems recover. The fruit trees need to be painted with lime. It wouldn't be a bad idea to put lime on the earth underneath the cherry trees either.'57 It was already hot on the French Riviera in early April, but in Moscow there was still snow after a long, hard winter. 'We are still using sle.ghs,' Maria wrote back, 'the snow is melting slowly and today we had new snow falling for a good half of the day. There s frost in the morm lg, and you can walk on the ice on the pond behind the red gates. There is no way one could even begin to think about the roses and the lilies and you will probably have to do the pruning and put up the canes yourself; the snow has got to melt first and there is still a lot of it about.'58
Chekhov spent his last mornings in Nice n 1898, not entirely
happily, in an artist's studio sitting n a green velvet chair wearing a black jacket and trousers and wl te tie, posing for a portrait that had been begun in Russia the previous summer. The 26 year-old painter Iosif Braz had come down to N:ce to firnsh the parting for the Tretyakov Gallery n Moscow. Chekhov quipped that с was a good likeness of him and his tie, but he still thought the express on made him look as if he had been sniffing horseradish.59 Just after a rainy Easter he left finally for Paris, longing now to be back home in Russia.
He returned to Nice for another prolonged visit in December 1900, again in pursuit of the chimerical dream of arresting the progress of his illness. This time he stayed for a month and a half rather than an entire winter, but was even less enthusiastic about the prospect of being abroad than before. A major factor now was his involvement, albeit mostly at a distance, with Oiga Kmpper. The success of their relationship was almost predicated on their living apart, but a large part of Chekhov's reluctance to return to Nice n December 1900 came from the thought of being so far away from Olga. Once again, Chekhov took a south-facing room w th a balcony at the Pension Russe look' lg out into the garden, and immediately felt homesick. Even the large monkey puzzle tree which stood in front of his w.ndow reminded him of Olga, as she had one growing in front of her window in Moscow Chekhov wrote twenty-two passionate love letters to her during the six weeks of his stay in Nice, and could not work out at first why he was not receiving any replies. He began wondering, with increasing indignation, why Olga had not been writing to him. 'Write to me, darling, don't be lazy,' he pleaded. 'You've got a j. le of letters from me and 1 naven't had a si igle one from you. What have I done to make you angry?' A couple of weeks later the mystery was unravelled, when it turned out that Chekhov's life had inadvertently become entangled with that of a retired officer li\ :ng in Nice. Andrei Chertkov had started receiving the love letters mtended for Chekhov because their surnames were sim'lar and the French postman had muddled them up. When the distinguished Russo- Turkish War veteran turned up one morning at the Pension Russe to hand the missing letters over to their rightful owner, Chekhov was relieved, but embarrassed that one had been opened. Chekhov reminded Olga of the need in future to spell out clearly Monsieur Antoine Tchekboff, 9 Rue Gounod.60
When he returned to Nice for that last visit, he spent the first week of his stay putting the final touches to Three Sisters, already in rehearsal at the Moscow Art Theatre. The major changes he now made to the last act included the addition of Masha's last words: 'Oh, how the music plays! They are leaving us; one of them has gone for good, never to recurn, and we will be left alone to start our lives again. We have to live . . . We have to live . ..' Was Chekhov reminded, when he wrote these lines, of the miserable days spent sequestered in his room at the Pension Russe while itinerant musicians played underneath his window back in October 1897? Perhaps they were indeed in the back of his mind as he reworked the poignant last act of the play, which ends with the sisters stoically facing up to the bleak reality of their lives while listening to rousing merry tunes played by a military band offstage. It was such a potent image that he returned to it two years later when he was writing his story 'The Bishop'. As the bishop in the story enters the last days of his life, he remembers the years he spent working abroad earlier in his career. Apart from sounds of the warm sea, he particularly recalls the homesickness he felt when a blind beggar girl came to sing about love underneath his window every day, accompanying herself on the guitar.61