When Philippe Labro, novelist, journalist, cineast, television producer and man about Paris, woke up one morning in 1999 at his usual hour of three o’clock it was with a profound and intimate conviction: ‘Quelque chose a changé.’ This was not occasioned by a physical malaise, although his bedclothes, even his pillows, were drenched with sweat, a phenomenon that was to recur in the days and weeks that followed, but something more seismic, what Scott Fitzgerald had called ‘the crack-up’, a nervous breakdown, unheralded and prolonged, from which he emerged two years later.
Unavailing attempts at the sort of cure conscientiously recommended by doctors, who prefer to describe the process as depression, were just as conscientiously undertaken. It is noticeable that nowhere in this brave book, written with exceptional clarity, did Labro claim to feel ‘depressed’. What he felt was fearful, broken, humiliated, bewildered, and it was not long before others in his milieu took his dramatic decline at his own valuation. Some, more motivated than others, pronounced him to be finished, and calculated that his prestigious job might soon be on offer. And indeed he himself, though incapable of rational thought, knew that he could not continue as he was, that the ‘change’ was not to be written off or dismissed. It was too worryingly obscure for that.
Within a short period of time he was reduced to a spectral and monosyllabic caricature of his former self. At one point he was unable to negotiate the distance between his sofa and the window of his room. When he struck his foot on a kerbstone in the rue de Varenne and fell he was disinclined to get up again. When, urged by kind friends to join them on a cruise in the Bahamas, he entered the pellucid waters for a swim, he almost allowed himself to be carried away by the current.
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