five o'clock in the morning
Going into his study and beginning to reflect , he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in Petersburg a year and a half ago , and had lunched with an old school-fellow , a civil engineer , and how that engineer had introduced to him and his wife a young man of two or three and twenty , called Mihail Ivanovitch , with rather a curious short surname -- Riss . Two months later the doctor had seen the young man 's photograph in his wife 's album , with an inscription in French : `` In remembrance of the present and in hope of the future . '' Later on he had met the young man himself at his mother-in-law 's . And that was at the time when his wife had taken to being very often absent and coming home at four or five o'clock in the morning , and was constantly asking him to get her a passport for abroad , which he kept refusing to do ; and a continual feud went on in the house which made him feel ashamed to face the servants . Six months before , his colleagues had decided that he was going into consumption , and advised him to throw up everything and go to the Crimea . When she heard of this , Olga Dmitrievna affected to be very much alarmed ; she began to be affectionate to her husband , and kept assuring him that it would be cold and dull in the Crimea , and that he had much better go to Nice , and that she would go with him , and there would nurse him , look after him , take care of him . Now , he understood why his wife was so particularly anxious to go to Nice : her Michel lived at Monte Carlo .