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to go overboard, soon friendship, love, sense of
duty, even pity itself are one after another washed
away. Despondency alone sticks to the doomed
ship to steer it on the rocks to total destruction.
Voltaire was right when he placed sleep on the
same level as hope.
I did not go off my head, I did not kill myself.
I staggered on with my work as best I could,
careless, indifferent what happened to myself, and
what happened to my patients. Beware of a
doctor who suffers from insomnia! My patients
began to complain that I was rough and impatient
with them, many of them left me, many stuck to
me still and so much the worse for them. Only
when they were about to die did I seem to wake
up from my torpor, for I continued to take keen
interest in Death long after I had lost all interest
in Life. I could still watch the approach of my
grim colleague with the same keenness I used to
watch him with when I was a student at the Salle
St. Claire, hoping against hope to wrench his
terrible secret from him. I could still sit the
whole night by the bedside of a dying patient
after having neglected him when I might have
been able to save him. They used to say I was
very kind to sit up like that the whole night when
the other doctors went away. But what did it
matter to me whether I sat on a chair by the
bedside of somebody else or lay awake in my own
bed? Luckily for me my increasing diffidence of
drugs and narcotics saved me from total
destruction, hardly ever did I myself take any of
the numerous sleeping-draughts I had to write
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