Mademoiselle Fleury

Mademoiselle Fleury, once governess to the Countess’s daughters, is one of the few members of the old household still present after its estate house has become a hospital. In Meliuzeievo she turns her eccentricity into a kind of social presence: she tells long stories, plays matchmaker between Nurse Antipova and Yurii Andreievich Zhivago, and later helps secure Zhivago a seat on the train to Moscow. The novel’s final return to her, now an aged Swiss woman in the city, quietly joins the upheavals of the wartime provinces to the ordinary, irreversible passage of years.

From Household Governess to Hospital Resident

The Countess’s house had once served occasional business visits and summer guests at the Razdolnoie estate. By the time it became a hospital, its owner was in prison in Petersburg and almost all of the large staff had gone. Only two women remained: Ustinia, the head cook, and Mademoiselle Fleury, formerly governess to the Countess’s daughters, who were now married. Fleury had therefore stayed through a sharp change in the house’s purpose and in the household that had defined it.

Her appearance makes her seem both displaced from the old domestic order and entirely at home in its successor. Gray-haired, pink-cheeked, and dishevelled, she shuffles around in bedroom slippers and a worn, floppy housecoat. She seems as comfortable in the hospital as she had been in the Zhabrinsky family home. The transformation of private estate into medical institution has not erased her habits of inhabiting a household; it has given those habits a new setting.

Storytelling and Matchmaking

Fleury fills that setting with talk and theatrical gesture. Speaking broken Russian and swallowing the ends of words in the French manner, she tells lengthy stories, gesticulates, strikes dramatic poses, and ends in hoarse laughter that gives way to coughing. Her speech is not merely a report of events: its performance is part of her eccentric, unmistakable presence among the hospital’s inhabitants.

She is also convinced that she understands Nurse Antipova completely and that the nurse and Zhivago must be attracted to one another. When she finds them together, she responds with delighted matchmaking, winking slyly and shaking a finger at them. Antipova is puzzled and Zhivago angered, but Fleury will not surrender the belief. Her certainty creates a comic mismatch between her romantic interpretation and the two people’s response; the narration presents it as an illusion she cherishes rather than as reliable knowledge of their feelings.

A Practical Intervention

Fleury’s part in Zhivago’s departure from the provinces is more concrete than her matchmaking. When the journey back to Moscow is being arranged, she summons Kolia and tells him to find the doctor a good seat on the train, threatening to expose him if he fails. Kolia tries to fend her off while carrying on a coded conversation over another instrument, but her demand is plain and insistent. Her intervention gives her eccentric authority an immediate practical consequence: she uses the pressure available to her to help Zhivago secure passage.

That episode stands against the scale of the journey itself. The train has twenty-three cars, with Zhivago’s family in the fourteenth; sailors occupy the front, civilian passengers the middle, and about five hundred labor conscripts are confined to eight cars at the rear. Fleury is not described as controlling the train’s larger arrangements, but her effort to get Zhivago a seat places her small act of assistance within a crowded, coercive movement of people across the country.

The Old Woman in Moscow

Much later, Fleury reappears in Moscow in a scene whose recognition is delayed until after Zhivago’s death. An old woman in a light straw hat decorated with linen daisies and cornflowers and a tight, old-fashioned lilac dress walks along the pavement, panting in the heat and fanning herself with a flat parcel. A small lace handkerchief serves to mop her damp lips and eyebrows. As the trolley carrying Zhivago repeatedly stops and starts, she alternately falls out of view and overtakes it, her steady progress set beside the stalled vehicle.

When Zhivago gets off the trolley, collapses on the paving, and does not rise, a crowd gathers around his body. Fleury approaches, pauses to look and listen, and understands enough to hear that the bystanders disagree about whether the body should be taken to a hospital or the police summoned. She does not stay for the outcome. The narrative then identifies her: she is Swiss, formerly from Meliuzeievo, and now very old. Her earlier, lively presence at the hospital has become a brief, anonymous-seeming appearance in the city, where she encounters the consequence of Zhivago’s final journey without knowing who has died.

Return, Survival, and Narrative Function

For twelve years Fleury has written to the authorities in Moscow asking permission to return to her native country. Her application has only recently been granted; she has come to the city for an exit visa and is walking to her embassy to collect it, her documents tied together with a ribbon. The small bundle she carries while fanning herself is thus not just a parcel: it contains the paperwork for a long-awaited departure. Her movement has a destination and an administrative purpose, even as the trolley’s repeated breakdowns make her route seem to cross Zhivago’s by chance.

The narration closes the crossing with an irony neither character can recognize. Fleury overtakes the trolley for the tenth time and continues on, entirely unaware that she has overtaken Zhivago and survived him. She is not shown learning of his death or reaching the embassy; her story stops with her walking away. By returning to a minor figure from the Meliuzeievo hospital at the moment of the protagonist’s death, the novel makes personal continuity visible across years of revolution, war, and displacement. Fleury’s persistence—first in her cherished romantic illusion, later in twelve years of petitions—belongs to a life that continues past the dramatic ending, without making that continuation any less solitary or contingent.