The joy of Xanax

The greater the enervation, it is said, the greater the appreciation of a work of art. There was no place in Mme Benoit’s energetic life for art, if the austere interior of her huge consulting room was anything to go by. Human dynamos don’t need pretty pictures to look at. On a tiled floor the size of a tennis court were metal shelving racks filled with cartons of various sizes and loose piles of documents. The decorative theme of her workspace could be described as ‘warehouse’. The only nod to domesticity was a sink in one corner.

This was my second visit to Mme Benoit in as many years to describe symptoms of a suspected urine infection. And once before that I had sat at her desk and told her that life had lost its savour and I felt cast among the flints. I remember how her handsome face had fallen; how she had spoken to me in a humorous and sceptical tone, as though she found it incredible that a grown man should come to her and utter such pathetic nonsense, and she could only therefore assume that I had some perfectly respectable and probably illegal ulterior motive — wanton idleness couldn’t be ruled out — for speaking in this shameful manner, a motive which, at the end of the day, was none of her business.

I can recall going out into the street afterwards with my sense of perspective so nearly regained by her derision that I popped the prescription for antidepressants she had laughingly given me in the nearest litter bin.

Whether this glamorous French doctor remembered me as that puny individual from years before was difficult to know, though her manner was once again humorously sceptical as I described my symptoms of pain and their frequency.