afternoon, but in October thousands of musicians started arriving in Nice to take part in international competitions. To the accompaniment of laughter and dancing, whole orchestras strolled through the city, providing impromptu concerts lit by torchlight (electric light was only installed on the Promenade des Anglais in 1894).36 Chekhov, meanwhile, was closeted indoors, far from all the gaiety, and forced while confronting his mortality to hear jubilant musicians out on the streets – as early as half-past seven one morning when he was writing to Maria, pretending bravely all was well.37 Chekhov had pinned his hopes on Suvorin visiting him after learning that he was in Paris, and his spirits sank still further when he now heard that his friend was not going to come. 'Your letter was a bombshell. I was so looking forward to seeing you, I wanted to spend time with you, talk to you, and to be honest I really need you! I had prepared a whole basketful of things to talk to you about, I had conjured up some delightful hot weather and then suddenly this letter. I am terribly disappointed!' Suvorin was, of course, the first person he confided in about his worsening health, but he typically made light of his condition initially (and was anxious that his family should not find out). A few weeks later he confessed to Suvorin's wife, Anna, that he had been coughing blood continuously for three weeks:
I have had to submit to various privations because of it: I do not go outside after three o'clock in the afternoon, I do not drink at all or eat anything hot, I do not walk fast, and stick only to the streets, I am not living basically – I'm a vegetable. And it irritates me, I'm in low spirits, and it seems to me that the Russians at dinner just talk about trivialities and nonsense, and I have to make an effort not to be rude to them.38
Writing to his sister about his health two days later, he skilfully deflected discussion of what was really going on by giving her a French lesson:
Now about my health. Everything is fine. Je suis bien portant. In French healthy is 'sain', but that only relates to food, water, climate; people say about themselves 'bien portant' from 'se porter bien' – to carry oneself well, to be healthy. When you greet people you say 'Je suis charme de vous voir bien portant' – I am delighted to see you looking well. . ?9
It was not in Chekhov's nature to succumb to self-pity, and besides, Alexei Lyubimov, another doctor who he became friendly with in Nice, was suffering from pleurisy and inflammation of the heart. 'As for my health,' he informed Suvorin before he was struck by another bout of blood-spitting, 'my illness is proceeding crescendo and is obviously already incurable: I'm talking about laziness. Apart from that I am as strong as an ox.' Yet in order not to tire himself going up two flights of stairs, Chekhov now moved down to the middle floor of the Pension Russe, which meant once again having to get used to a new desk. He also found it difficult adapting to the new regime which confined him to barracks in the middle of the afternoon. 'Because of the blood I am sitting at home as if I was under arrest, and here I am writing to you and wondering what else to say,' he wrote to Suvorin in December. 'I am bored and lonely on my own'. A few weeks later Dr Lyubimov died, and Chekhov joined the mourners at his funeral in the Russian cemetery at Caucade on a hill five miles to the west of the city. Its views are now blighted by buildings and roads, but in 1898 it was a green and peaceful place with clean, sweet-smelling air. Chekhov loved it.40 After the cemetery was founded in 1867, the bodies of Russians who had been buried in the English graveyard next door were transferred here, and a small Orthodox chapel erected.41
The pleasure that Chekhov took in being in the south of France palled when the symptoms of tuberculosis reappeared; he began feeling homesick for Russia and for proper winter weather. It rained continuously for three days at the end of November and he told his mother in a letter that he had bought a light silk umbrella for six francs. It is tempting to think he might have made his purchase at the little umbrella shop in the Rue Colonna d'Istria in the old city. With a sign proudly proclaiming Maison fondee en 1850 above the door, and an interior that seems unchanged since those times, it was a venerable institution even by the time Chekhov was living in Nice, and still sells elegantly patterned parasols alongside more practical parapluies. Perhaps Chekhov went back there to buy the umbrellas requested by his mother and sister as well. Rain made him yearn for snow and crisp Russian winter days, and he wondered if his friend Alexandra Khotyaintseva in Paris was also hankering for snow. 'After all, like laikas, you and I don't feel quite normal without snow,' he wrote to her two days before the non-Russian residents of Nice celebrated Christmas.42
Chekhov missed his two laika puppies – he had had to leave them only weeks after they had arrived at Melikhovo, after all. Chekhov's father had written in September to tell him that the puppies had grown and that the first snow had fallen, and shortly afterwards Masha wrote to say that they had dug up all the tulips she had planted, and so she wished her brother had taken them with him to France.43 Chekhov told her by return that the puppies needed disciplining, and asked his sister to take a photograph of them to send him, as people were always asking him what sort of dogs they were and were interested. He encountered all kinds of dogs when he went out for his walks every day, but toy breeds seemed to be more popular than Siberian hunting dogs in metropolitan Nice. They were usually in muzzles, he told his mother in a letter (describing to her one particular long-haired dachshund he had seen which he thought looked like a furry caterpillar), but even so they seemed very cultured to him somehow. 'Culture oozes out of every shop window, from every raffia basket,' he wrote to Suvorin's wife Anna; 'every dog smells of civilization.'44 Sadly, before Masha could produce a photograph of Nansen and Laika, both puppies died at the hands of malicious boys from the village. The dogs had endeared themselves to the Chekhov household by coming home promptly for lunch and dinner after running round outside all day and even Masha
was saddened by having to report the protracted death of Nansen in early January. It had ruined everybody's New Year festivities, she said. Then a few weeks later she had to write with the news that Laika too had fallen ill and died.45
Watching all those dogs being taken out for walks in Nice made Chekhov ponder a subject for a story which two years later would become 'The Lady with the Little Dog'. He made the following entry in his notebook around this time: 'Animals are always trying to sniff out secrets (find the lair), and that's why human beings are doing battle with their own animal instincts in respecting other people's secrets.'46 In the story, this idea is recognizable in Gurov's thoughts as he walks his daughter to school on his way to a reunion with his beloved Anna:
As he was talking, he was thinking about the fact that he was going to a rendezvous and that there was not one living soul who knew about it; probably no one ever would know about it. He had two lives: one was the public one, which was visible to everybody who needed to know about it, but was full of conditional truth and conditional deceit, just like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, while the other one was secret. And by some strange coincidence, perhaps it was just chance, but everything that was important, interesting and essential to him, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, and which made up the inner core of his life, was hidden from others, while everything that was false -the outer skin in which he hid in order to cover up the truth, like his work at the bank, for example, the arguments at the club, his 'lesser species', and going to receptions with his wife – all that was public. And he judged others to be like himself, not believing what he saw, and always supposing that each person's real and most interesting life took place beneath a shroud of secrecy, as if under the veil of night. Every individual existence is a mystery, and it is maybe partly for this reason that cultured people take such pains for their secrets to be respected.
'The Lady with the Little Dog' is set in Yalta, and was written in Yalta, but bearing in mind Chekhov's remark that he needed to write from memory, he may well also have been inspired by the dozens of chic ladies walking their poodles up and down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice when he composed its famous opening:
People were saying that someone new had appeared on the seafront: a lady with a little dog. Dmitry Dmitrievich Gurov had been staying in Yalta for two weeks now, and had settled into its rhythm, so he too had begun to take an interest in new faces. As he was sitting in the pavilion at Vernet's he watched the young lady walking along the seafront; she was not very tall, fair-haired and she was wearing a beret; a white Pomeranian dog scampered after her.47
