Across the pond

Frederic Arnoult, aged 42, hanged himself in his flat by the Gare du Nord in Paris on Sunday 21 June 2009. As I sit down to write this four weeks later, I still cannot believe that I will never talk to him again. And, like all the two hundred friends and relations who gathered at the crematorium on the banks of the Seine on Thursday 2 July, I am left wondering, why he killed himself. He was a talented and successful architect. He was in a happy relationship with his partner of several years, Regis. He had many close friends, because he also had a gift for friendship. Whatever his own problems, he found time to listen to the their concerns.

But as I write I realise it was his talent for living theatre that most endeared him to me. Which came to life in the living room of my house in London, on the bridges of Paris and in front of the Louvre. Where he hammed it up with a ‘script’ which borrowed from the Goons, Spike Milligan and Monty Python. But which was pure Fred. And which got the rest of us, joining in, creating this living theatre for our own entertainment.

So much for joie de vivre. And yet for an hour or two on Sunday morning a month ago, he was feeling such despair that he killed himself.

He left a note to Regis, in which, as I had heard before I went to Paris, he felt that he could no longer cope with the demands of his work for one of France’s most respected firms of architects. But when I questioned Regis about it, he told me that he had also said that the work stress was affecting his ability to be there for his friends.

Fred was French, not a buttoned up Englishman, who suffered in silence until life became unbearable. His friends knew he was under serious pressure and had rallied round. On Saturday lunchtime several of them went to lunch at his flat and left convinced that they had cheered him up. That he was now looking forward to the holidays that all the French take for the whole of August.

On Sunday morning Regis was not at all worried when he left to go to his job at Christian Dior, which, like many of the big names is reacting to the credit crunch by calling its staff to work on Sundays as well as the rest of the week.

Fred must have killed himself just after Regis left the house.

Fred did not have a long history of depressive illness. But two or three years ago he had reached a similar low because of work pressures. He had then been persuaded to go to a psycho-analyst with whom he spent many hours, during which he was  prescribed anti-depressants to get him over the immediate crisis. After a few months Fred decided he was cured, and stopped going. The analyst rang him. According to what Fred told his friends, the analyst had told him that he loved him. Fred had replied that the analyst was no better than a prostitute, because he was paying for his services. He could not possibly really love him.

According to his friends there were still anti-depressants in the medicine cabinet, and Fred had been taking them in the last two or three days. No-one knows how many. But the medical literature is clear. If you take a lot they can produce the opposite effect – severe depression. If you take a few too many they can make you euphoric, manic and dangerously irrational.

On Eurostar going to Paris I had been conjecturing that Fred may have been driven to kill himself by pressures on him from his employers, who must surely be feeling the credit crunch. At the funeral I talked to several of his architect colleagues. I discovered that his firm was doing well, despite the credit crunch. And that Fred was regarded by his colleagues, as a strong man, who was on top of his own job, and had time to spare to help them.

So my conclusion is that Fred killed himself because of his own imperatives. He felt, in that moment, that he was no longer good enough to meet his own idea of what he wanted to be.

I am tempted to assert that he was unbalanced by the anti-depressives. But that would be dishonest, because my own experience of the pills, chronicled in this blog, is that, powerful though they are, they are not as powerful as the human will.

So I don’t know why he killed himself.

But I shall end with the comments of two of his closest friends.

Sophie said he must have got into a ‘black hole’.

Francois said, ‘It is the end of youth.’

Their views are as valid as those of the experts.

And they, like me, feel their lives have been enriched by knowing him.

Keats and Rupert Brooke only lived into their twenties. Fred had twice as long on earth but his early death, to those who knew him, is just as much a tragedy.