so warm he kept his windows wide open, and then found it difficult to work with the sun streaming 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 incapable of working unless the weather was bad. And the musicians who wandered into the courtyard with their mandolins, violins and guitars to give impromptu concerts under his windows every morning 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 wrote 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 going 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 Paganini (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 Russian 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 proximity to the main 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.25 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 their friends to such a seedy part of town.26
The Pension Russe was certainly a far cry from the opulent Hotel Saint-Petersbourg, the preferred residence for expatriate aristocrats, or the equally imposing Hotel Beau-Rivage on the seafront, where Chekhov had stayed on his first brief visits to Nice. After visiting the Beau-Rivage
one day, he wrote to Suvorin to tell him that the enormous chandeliered dining room with its columns and ornately painted ceiling, and the reading room, were just as they had been when they had stayed there.27 The Pension Russe, by contrast, was altogether more homely, but was something of a venerable institution for visiting Russians even before Chekhov's sojourns. The satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin spent a winter there in 1875, and Lenin was later to be a guest for a few days in the spring of 1909, as one of the plaques on the wall of the present-day Hotel L'Oasis attests.28 In the concrete urban jungle of contemporary Nice, the quiet garden filled with palms, orange trees and twittering birds that still surrounds the hotel suggests its new name is entirely apt.
Cosmopolitan Nice drew visitors from all over the world, even from the remote Sandwich Islands, as Chekhov pointed out to his sister in one of the regular bulletins he sent back home to his family.29 He, however, lived a decidedly Russian life in the midst of this Mediterranean setting, both in terms of where he was staying and the people he chose to spend time with. At the Pension Russe, not only the manager but also the cook was Russian. As well as sometimes serving cabbage soup and borshch, Evgenia provided the residents of the Pension Russe with something to talk about. She had not only thirty years experience of living in Nice, but a marriage to an African sailor behind her, and their daughter Sonia was to be seen on occasion returning home at night with different male escorts. Even Chekhov provoked a few raised eyebrows by receiving a female friend in his room rather than in the hotel's drawing room. To his great relief, the establishment's forty or so Russian residents seemed to have little idea who he was when he first arrived, although at one point he was amused to overhear a young couple from Kiev reading his stories aloud to each other in the room next door.30
The ordeal of having to dine with elderly widows, provincial officials and down-at-heel gentry every day was occasionally mitigated by the company of friends like the Moscow Art Theatre founder Vladimir Nemirovich- Danchenko, who came on short visits. And there was also some socializing at the Pension Russe with friends Chekhov made in Nice, all of them fellow countrymen, mostly scholarly types. There was the kindly Russian Vice- Consul Nikolai Yurasov, whose son worked round the corner from the hotel at the Credit Lyonnais where Chekhov did his financial transactions. He had people over to his house every
week for lunch a la Russe.31 Then there was Professor Korotnev, a zoologist who had also graduated in medicine from Moscow University and shared Chekhov's passion for the landscapes of his friend Levitan, Valerian Yakobi, a retired professor of art, also suffering from tuberculosis, and Maxim Kovalevsky, a free-thinking former Moscow University professor with a larger-than-life personality and his own villa in nearby Beaulieu, twenty minutes away. Of all these people Chekhov was friendliest with Kovalevsky, who was nine years his senior. As a keen gardener, Chekhov admired the roses blooming in Kovalevsky's garden, but decided that they were no better than the roses in Russia. He hated to cut his own flowers, but was able to be less stringent in Nice, where there were profusions of beautiful flowers everywhere on sale very cheaply. His room at the Pension Russe was often filled with the scent of flowers he had bought himself, or bouquets sent by admirers,32 and he clearly enjoyed walking in the mornings through the open-air marche aux fleurs in the old part of the city.
Chekhov soon settled into the the Pension Russe's rhythm, generally waking at seven, breakfasting on eggs, croissants and coffee at seven-thirty, and having lunch at midday, followed by a cup of hot chocolate at two-thirty. Dinner was served at six-thirty, and sometimes Chekhov took tea and biscuits later on in his room with other guests, one of whom, Dr Valter, was also a graduate of the Taganrog gymnasium, and ensured Chekhov did not stay up too late with him reminiscing about their childhood. Usually Chekhov went to bed at about 11 p.m., and was then eaten alive by mosquitoes, which left him itching for days until he eventually discovered citronella candles. He was relieved to report to one friend that the mosquitoes seemed to have finally migrated to Egypt by December.33 French courtesy made a great impression on Chekhov: he noticed that one could not leave a shop without saying at least 'bonjour', and that even beggars had to be addressed as 'monsieur' or 'madame'. The maid who greeted him with a radiant 'Bonjour monsieur' and a large cup of coffee each morning, smiled continually like a duchess in a play, he told his brother Ivan, even though the work clearly exhausted her. In general, Chekhov had far more flattering things to say about the 'kind and honest' French staff at the hotel than about its Russian guests, who soon began to exercise his patience – the female ones in particular.34 Chekhov may have been mentally in Russia while he was in Nice, but the long months he spent there gave him an
opportunity to learn French. He passed on some of the phrases he mastered in letters to his sister, in which he also remarked upon the bad pronunciation habits of expatriate Russians, and the contrast between the crude turns of phrase encountered in Russian and the unfailingly polite expressions used by the French.
During the belle epoque no one went to the Cote d'Azur in the summer. Most hotels remained closed until the end of September, and so Chekhov arrived in Nice just as the high season was about to start. Between 1860 and 1911, the resort grew faster than any city in Europe, attracting over a hundred thousand foreign visitors annually.35 But while affluent foreigners were pouring into Nice to attend glittering soirees, go yachting, play tennis, polo and, in the British case, cricket, Chekhov was receiving a chilling reminder of why he had come to the south of France in the first place: five days after boasting to his sister about the robust state of his health, he had started coughing up blood again. There was music in the municipal gardens every day except Monday from two-thirty to four in the
