And he already could not say a $rngle word nor understand what was happening and was imagining himself as a simple, ordinary person, walking briskly and happily through the fields, tapping 1 ;s stick, while up above him was the huge sky, flooded with sunshine; he was as free as a bird now and could go wherever he wanted!40
Chapter 12
WHITE DEATH IN THE BLACK FOREST
I
Badenweiler
Badenweiler is a nice little place, warm, easy to live in, and cheap, but in about two or three days I will probably be starting to think of where to run away from the boredom.
Letter to DrP. Kurkin, 12 June 1904
Chekhov said his last goodbye to Moscow on 3 June 1904, when he was helped cn to a train bound for Germany. He had arrived from Yalta exactly a month earlier, and had spent the intervening weeks taking his leave of the city. When he was well enough, what he most enjoyed was going for carriage rides with his wife along the city's leafy boulevards and basking in the spring sunshine; in early May the trees would have just come into leaf in Moscow. He had spent most of that time, however, bed-ridden and very ill, recei ng daily visits from his wife's German doctor. Despite his condition, he still managed to check the final proofs of The Cherry Orchard before they, were sent off to the printing press and read manuscript submissions in his capacity as literary editor of Russian Thought. He talked to actors from the Moscow Art Theatre about forthcoming productions, pulled strings on behalf of his acquaintance Deacon Lyubimov so that his son could be transferred to Moscow University, and met with his friend Pyotr Kurkin, who was now an mportant zemstvo doctor. Dr Taube, his German physician, recommended that Chekhov undertake a cure in the health resort of Badenweiler in the Black Forest. This meant a train journey from Moscow lasting several days, and when Chekhov was safsly installed in his carriage, he must have known deep down that he would never return alive. En route came a stop in Berlin, where there was a consultation with the distinguished Dr Ewald who just threw up his hands, unable to conceal from his patient how hopeless his case was. Only the convivial and lighthearted company of the Berlin correspondent of the Russian Gazette could dispel Chekhov's overwhelming gloom. Then came a further day's train journey from Berlin in the north-east to Badenweiler in the south-west.
The Black Forest was a popular destination at the beginning of the twentieth century. Badenweiler, in particular, had become a fashionable resort to be seen in once it was made properly accessible by road'in the 1850s, around the time when the first pump-room was built. Finally, in 1895, a narrow-gauge railway took over from the horse-drawn carriage in transporting people the four and a half miles from Mtillheim on the main railway line. Winding through the hamlets of Niederweiler and Oberweiler, it carried scores of visitors up to Badenweiler, 700 feet above the Rhine. Chekhov and Olga probably made the gentle ascent on the steam train, perhaps even sitting in the open-air summer carriage for the thirty minutes of the journey's duration (three times quicker than going by horse-drawn carriage, and four times cheaper).1 With its Arcadian setting, Badenweiler was a favoured summer watering place for the Grand Dukes of Baden, whose Grand-Ducal Palace faced the entrance to the Kurpark. The fairytale ruined castle on the conical hill above the Kurhaus had been built in the eleventh century by their ancestors, the first margraves of Baden, and destroyed in the eighteenth by Louis XIV2 Chekhov was so ill, he could not even contemplate climbing to the top to look out on the lush view of wooded mountains. It was here that the notorious 'white death' - so called because of the link of tuberculosis with childhood and purity, as well as its victims' anaemic pallor - was to claim another of its victims.
The thermal springs of Badenweiler's spa had been attracting visitors for almost 2,000 years when Chekhov and his wife finally arrived on 9 June 1904. Tucked into the soft green hills on the south-western edge of the Black Forest, near the French and Swiss borders, and sheltered by the fir-covered slopes of the Blauen mountain, Badenweiler was justly famous for the Roman baths which were established there towards the end of the first century. It is possible that their construction was commissioned by the Emperor Vespasian himself, having earlier commanded a legion m the area, as the Romans continued the relentless expansion of their empire north of the Alps into German lands. Bathing occupied such a hallowed place in Roman daily life that thermae were built wherever the army set up a fort. The sophisticated succession of hot and cold pools in the former Roman settlement of Aquae Villae were probably enjoyed by dusty centurions until the Alamannic invasion in the middle of the third century. Along with those at Bath and Pompeii, they are among the largest and best-preserved Roman bathb m existence, and were first discovered in 1784 by accident in the middle of the Kurpark, just as Badenweiler was beginning to emerge as a spa resort. A distinguishing feature of the Roman baths at Badenweiler was the custom for men and women to bathe separately, as in Pompeii, and the tradition was initially continued in the vaulted spaces of the handsome late rineteenth-century Markgrafenbad, or Margravian Baths, built in imitation of the Roman style.
During the season, which lasted from March to October, Badenweiler's 700-odd permanent residents had to cope with the influx of some 6,000 visitors, each of whom would have thei r name recorded in twice-weekly Visi ;ors' Lrsts and be made to pay a daily Visitors' Tax. Some of the grander resorts like nearby Baden-Baden (so named to avoid confusion with the municipalities of Baden in Switzerland and Austria) had come to be dominated by their smart hotels and casinos. Badenweiler, on the other hand, stayed true to the close-to-nature ideals of the original 'ville d'eau', established in the seventeenth century in the Belgian town of Spa. hat resort, which in the twentieth century would acquire greater fame for the sound of screaming Formula One engines on ts Grand Prix circirt, had also first been developed by the Romans. By the end of the n neteenth century Badenweiler's gentle climate and invigorating air was attracting large numbers of visitors with cardiac and pulmonary complaints, along with those who simply came to take the waters. Chekhov, whose stay in Badenweiler provides the town's other ma n claim to fame, was one such visitor. The last hotel he stayed in was just across the road from the Markgrafenbad, but it was, sadly, too late for h m to benef.t from its amenities, so advanced had his tuberculosis become. Somewhat inconveniently for the spa management, who wished to promote Badenweiler primarily as a health resort rather than as a 'Magic Mountain' of sanatoria for emaciated consumpti res, he died three weeks after he arrived.
Chekhov had always found the ;dea of going to a sanatorium abhorrent and only consented to the idea when Dr Taube in Moscow reassured him that it was possible to stay in a hotel or private apartment in Badenwe;ler. Taube particularly recommended Badenweiler because he revered Josef Schwoerer, who had been Grand-Ducal Baths doctor since 1900. The first two nights of Chekhov's stay were spent at Badenweiler's most prestigious hotel, the Romerbad. Located on the square at the end of the main street, the Kaiserstrasse, between the Grand-Ducal Palace and the Kurhaus, this was the preferred residence for certain wealthy Russian aristocrats who booked whole floors and brought their own chefs. This was not a mi''cu Chekhov had ever mixed Vvith. The handsome Dr Schwoerer, whose scarred cheek bore the traces of student duels, was appalled that his new pat'ent had been allowed to undertake such a long journey ;n his condi^on, but started coming three times a day to take his temperature, at eight, two, and six in the evening. He was thirty-five - nine years younger than Chekhov - and married to Elizaveta Zhivago, originally from Moscow. His best friend, also a doctor, was married to her sister and they travelled to Russia often, particularly for bear hunting in w; iter.3