The Seventh Function of Language

1

Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so. Roland Barthes walks up Rue de Bièvre. The greatest literary critic of the twentieth century has every reason to feel anxious and upset. His mother, with whom he had a highly Proustian relationship, is dead. And his course on “The Preparation of the Novel” at the Collège de France is such a conspicuous failure it can no longer be ignored: all year, he has talked to his students about Japanese haikus, photography, the signifier and the signified, Pascalian diversions, café waiters, dressing gowns, and lecture-hall seating—about everything but the novel. And this has been going on for three years. He knows, without a doubt, that the course is simply a delaying tactic designed to push back the moment when he must start a truly literary work, one worthy of the hypersensitive writer lying dormant within him and who, in everyone’s opinion, began to bud in his A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, which has become a bible for the under-25s. From Sainte-Beuve to Proust, it is time to step up and take the place that awaits him in the literary pantheon. Maman is dead: he has come full circle since Writing Degree Zero. The time has come.

Politics? Yeah, yeah, we’ll see about that. He can’t really claim to be very Maoist since his trip to China. Then again, no one expects him to be.

Chateaubriand, La Rochefoucauld, Brecht, Racine, Robbe-Grillet, Michelet, Maman. A boy’s love.

I wonder if the area was already full of Vieux Campeur shops back then.

In a quarter of an hour, he will be dead.

I’m sure he ate well, on Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. I imagine people like that serve pretty good food. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes decodes the contemporary myths erected by the middle classes to their own glory. And it was this book that made him truly famous. So, in a way, he owes his fortune to the bourgeoisie. But that was the petite bourgeoisie. The ruling classes who serve the people are a very particular case that merits analysis; he should write an article. Tonight? Why not right away? But no, first he has to organize his slides.

Roland Barthes ups his pace without paying attention to the world around him, despite being a born observer, a man whose job consists of observing and analyzing, who has spent his entire life scrutinizing signs of every kind. He really doesn’t see the trees or the sidewalks or the store windows or the cars on Boulevard Saint-Germain, which he knows like the back of his hand. He is not in Japan anymore. He doesn’t feel the bite of the cold. He barely even hears the sounds of the street. It’s a bit like Plato’s allegory of the cave in reverse: the world of ideas in which he shuts himself away obscures his awareness of the world of the senses. Around him, he sees only shadows.

These reasons I mention to explain Roland Barthes’s anxiety are all well known. But I want to tell you what actually happened. If his mind is elsewhere that day, it’s not only because of his dead mother or his inability to write a novel or even his increasing and, he thinks, irreversible loss of appetite for boys. I’m not saying that he’s not thinking about these things; I have no doubts about the quality of his obsessive neuroses. But, today, there is something else. In the absent gaze of a man lost in his thoughts, the attentive passerby would have recognized that state which Barthes thought he was destined never to feel again: excitement. There is more to him than his mother and boys and his phantom novel. There is the libido sciendi, the lust for learning, and, awoken by it, the flattering prospect of revolutionizing human knowledge and, perhaps, changing the world. Does Barthes feel like Einstein, thinking about his theory as he crosses Rue des Écoles? What is certain is that he’s not really looking where he’s going. He is less than a hundred feet from his office when he is hit by a van. His body makes the familiar, sickening, dull thudding sound of flesh meeting metal, and it rolls over the pavement like a rag doll. Passersby flinch. This afternoon—February 25, 1980—they cannot know what has just happened in front of their eyes. For the very good reason that, until today, no one understands anything about it.

2

Semiology is a very strange thing. It was Ferdinand de Saussure, the founding father of linguistics, who first dreamed it up. In his Course in General Linguistics, he proposes imagining “a science that studies the life of signs within society.” Yep, that’s all. For those who wish to tackle this, he adds a few guidelines: “It would form a part of social psychology and, consequently, of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, ‘sign’). It would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since it does not exist yet, no one can say what it will be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of this general science; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.” I wish Anthony Hopkins would reread this passage for us, enunciating each word as he does so well, so that the whole world could at least grasp all its beauty if not its meaning. A century later, this brilliant intuition, which was almost incomprehensible to his contemporaries when the course was taught in 1906, has lost none of its power or its obscurity. Since then, numerous semiologists have attempted to provide clearer and more detailed definitions, but they have contradicted each other (sometimes without realizing it themselves), got everything muddled up, and ultimately succeeded only in lengthening (and even then, not by much) the list of systems of signs beyond language: the highway code, the international maritime code, and bus and hotel numbers have been added to military ranks and the sign language alphabet … and that’s about it.

Rather meager in comparison with the original ambition.

Seen this way, far from being an extension of the domain of linguistics, semiology seems to have been reduced to the study of crude proto-languages, which are much less complex and therefore much more limited than any real language.

But in fact, that’s not the case.

It’s no accident that Umberto Eco, the wise man of Bologna, one of the last great semiologists, referred so often to the key, decisive inventions in the history of humanity: the wheel, the spoon, the book … perfect tools, he said, unimprovable in their effectiveness. And indeed, everything suggests that in reality semiology is one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity and one of the most powerful tools ever forged by man. But as with fire or the atom, people don’t know what the point of it is to begin with, or how to use it.

3

In fact, a quarter of an hour later, he still isn’t dead. Roland Barthes lies in the gutter, inert, but a hoarse wheeze escapes his body. And while his mind sinks into unconsciousness, probably full of whirling haikus, Racinian alexandrines, and Pascalian aphorisms, he hears—maybe the last thing he will hear, he thinks (he does think, surely)—a distraught man yelling: “He thrrrew himself under my wheels! He thrrrew himself under my wheels!” Where’s that accent from? Around him, the passersby are recovering from the shock, have gathered in a circle and are leaning over what will soon be his corpse, discussing, analyzing, evaluating:

“We should call an ambulance!”

“No point. He’s done for.”

“He thrrrew himself under my wheels—you werrre all witnesses!”

“Doesn’t look too good, does he?”

“Poor guy…”

“We have to find a pay phone. Anyone got some coins?”

“I didn’t even have to time to brrrake!”

“Don’t touch him. We must wait for the ambulance.”

“Let me through! I’m a doctor.”

“Don’t turn him over!”

“I’m a doctor. He’s still alive.”

“Someone should inform his family.”

“Poor guy…”

“I know him!”

“Was it suicide?”

“We have to find out his blood group.”

“He’s a customer of mine. He comes to my bar for a drink every morning.”

“He won’t be coming anymore…”

“Is he drunk?”

“He smells of alcohol.”

“A glass of white, sitting at the bar. Same thing every morning, for years.”

“That doesn’t help us with his blood group…”

“He crrrossed the rrroad without looking!”

“The driver must remain in control of his vehicle at all times. That’s the law here.”

“Don’t worry, man, you’ll be fine. As long as you’ve got good insurance…”

“Yeah, there goes his no-claims bonus, though.”

“Don’t touch him!”

“I’m a doctor!”

“So am I.”

“Look after him, then. I’ll go and call an ambulance.”

“I have to deliverrr my merrrchandise…”

Most of the world’s languages use an apico-alveolar r, known as the rolled r, in contrast to French, which adopted the dorso-velar R about three hundred years ago. There is no rolled r in German or English. Nor in Italian or Spanish. Portuguese, maybe? True, it does sound a little guttural, but the man’s intonation is not nasal or singsong enough; it’s quite monotonous, in fact, so much so that it’s hard to make out the notes of panic.

So he’s probably a Russian.

4

Born of linguistics and almost doomed to be the runt of the litter, used only for the study of the most rudimentary, limited languages, how at the last possible moment was semiology able to turn itself into a neutron bomb?

By means Barthes was familiar with.

To begin with, semiology was devoted to the study of nonlinguistic systems of communication. Saussure himself told his students: “Language is a system of signs expressing ideas, and in this way is comparable to writing, the sign language alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals, et cetera. It is simply the most important of these systems.” This is more or less true, but only if we limit the definition of systems of signs to those designed to communicate explicitly and intentionally. The Belgian linguist Eric Buyssens defines semiology as “the study of communication processes; in other words, means used to influence others and recognized as such by the others in question.”

Barthes’s stroke of genius is to not content himself with communication systems but to extend his field of inquiry to systems of meaning. Once you have tasted that freedom, you quickly become bored with anything less: studying road signs or military codes is about as fascinating for a linguist as playing gin rummy would be for a poker player, or checkers for a chess player. As Umberto Eco might say: for communicating, language is perfect; there could be nothing better. And yet, language doesn’t say everything. The body speaks, objects speak, history speaks, individual or collective destinies speak, life and death speak to us constantly in a thousand different ways. Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere: in the color of his wife’s coat, in the stripe on the door of his car, in the eating habits of the people in the apartment next door, in France’s monthly unemployment figures, in the banana-like taste of Beaujolais nouveau (it always tastes either like banana or, less often, raspberry. Why? No one knows, but there must be an explanation, and it is semiological), in the proud, stately bearing of the black woman striding ahead of him through the corridors of the metro, in his colleague’s habit of leaving the top two buttons of his shirt undone, in some footballer’s goal celebration, in the way his partner screams when she has an orgasm, in the design of that piece of Scandinavian furniture, in the main sponsor’s logo at this tennis tournament, in the soundtrack to the credits of that film, in architecture, in painting, in cooking, in fashion, in advertising, in interior decor, in the West’s representation of women and men, love and death, heaven and earth, etc. With Barthes, signs no longer need to be signals: they have become clues. A seismic shift. They’re everywhere. From now on, semiology is ready to conquer the world.

5

Superintendent Bayard reports to the emergency room of Pitié-Salpêtrière, where he is given Roland Barthes’s room number. The case he is investigating can be summarized as follows: a man, sixty-four years old, knocked over by a laundry van, Rue des Écoles, Monday afternoon, while on a pedestrian crossing. The driver of the van, one Yvan Delahov, of Bulgarian nationality, tested positive for alcohol but was below the limit: 0.6 g, while the legal maximum is 0.8. He admitted that he was running late, delivering his shirts. Nevertheless, he claimed that he was not driving at more than 60 kilometers per hour. The victim was unconscious when the ambulance arrived, and had no papers on his person, but he was identified by one of his colleagues, a certain Michel Foucault, a lecturer at the Collège de France and a writer. The man, it turns out, was Roland Barthes, also a lecturer at the Collège de France and a writer.

So far, nothing justified sending an investigator, never mind a superintendent from the Renseignements Généraux, the French police’s intelligence service. Jacques Bayard’s presence is, in truth, down to one detail: when Roland Barthes was run over, on February 25, 1980, he had just eaten lunch with François Mitterrand, on Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

In theory, there is no link between the lunch and the accident, nor between the Socialist candidate for the following year’s presidential election and some laundry firm’s Bulgarian driver, but it is the habit of Renseignements Généraux to gather information about everything, and especially, during this lead-up to the election campaign, about François Mitterrand. Michel Rocard is more popular in the opinion polls (Sofres survey, January 1980: “Who is the best Socialist candidate?” Mitterrand 20 percent, Rocard 55 percent), but presumably those in high places do not believe that he will dare to cross the Rubicon: the French Socialists believe in following the rules, and Mitterrand has been reelected as leader of the party. Six years ago, he gained 49.19 percent of the vote against Giscard’s 50.81 percent: the smallest margin of defeat recorded in a presidential election since the establishment of universal suffrage. So it’s impossible to dismiss the risk that a left-wing president could be elected for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic; that is why the RG have sent an investigator. Jacques Bayard’s mission consists essentially in verifying whether Barthes drank too much at Mitterrand’s apartment or, better still, whether he took part in a sadomasochistic orgy involving dogs. The Socialist leader has been involved in so few scandals in recent years that one might almost imagine he was deliberately watching his step. The fake kidnapping in the Observatory Gardens has been forgotten. The Francisque medal awarded by the Vichy regime is now taboo. They need something new. Officially, Jacques Bayard’s task is to establish the circumstances of the accident, but he doesn’t need to have spelled out what is expected of him: to find out if there is any way of damaging the Socialist candidate’s credibility by investigating and, if necessary, smearing him.

When Jacques Bayard reaches the hospital room, he discovers a line several yards long outside in the corridor. Everyone is waiting to visit the victim. There are well-dressed old people, badly dressed young people, badly dressed old people, well-dressed young people, people of all kinds, long-haired and short-haired, some North African types, more men than women. While waiting their turn, they talk among themselves, speaking in loud voices, sometimes yelling, or they read books, smoke cigarettes. Bayard is yet to fully appreciate just how famous Barthes is and must be wondering what the hell is going on. As is his prerogative, he walks to the front of the line, says “Police,” and enters the room.

Jacques Bayard notes immediately: the surprisingly high bed, the tube stuck in the throat, the bruises on the face, the sad look. There are four other people in the room: the younger brother, the editor, the disciple, and some kind of young Arab prince, very chic. The Arab prince is Youssef, a mutual friend of the master and his disciple, Jean-Louis, whom the master considers the most brilliant of his students, or at least the one he feels the greatest affection for. Jean-Louis and Youssef share an apartment in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, where they organize parties that brighten up Barthes’s life. He meets so many people there: students, actresses, lots of celebrities, often the director André Téchiné, sometimes Isabelle Adjani, and always a crowd of young intellectuals. For now, these details do not interest Superintendent Bayard, who is here simply to reconstruct the circumstances of the accident. Barthes regained consciousness after his arrival at the hospital. He declared to his close friends, who rushed to his bedside: “How stupid of me! How stupid!” Despite the multiple contusions and a few broken ribs, his condition did not appear too worrying. But Barthes has an “Achilles’ heel,” as his younger brother puts it: his lungs. He had tuberculosis in his youth, and he is a prodigious cigarette smoker. Result: a chronic respiratory weakness that catches up with him that night: he starts suffocating, has to be intubated. When Bayard arrives, Barthes is awake but no longer able to speak.

Bayard talks quietly to Barthes. He is going to ask him a few questions; all he need do is nod or shake his head to indicate yes or no. Barthes stares at the superintendent with his sad spaniel eyes. He gives a weak nod.

“You were on your way to your place of work when the vehicle hit you, is that correct?” Barthes nods. “Was the vehicle moving quickly?” Barthes tilts his head slowly from side to side, and Bayard understands: he doesn’t know. “Were you distracted?” Yes. “Was your inattention connected to your lunch?” No. “To the course you had to prepare?” A pause. Yes. “Did you meet François Mitterrand at that lunch?” Yes. “Did anything special or unusual happen during that lunch?” A pause. No. “Did you consume alcohol?” Yes. “A lot?” No. “One glass?” Yes. “Two glasses?” Yes. “Three glasses?” A pause. Yes. “Four glasses?” No. “Did you have your papers with you when the accident happened?” Yes. A pause. “Are you sure?” Yes. “You did not have any papers on you when you were found. Is it possible you forgot them, left them at home or somewhere else?” A longer pause. Barthes’s gaze is suddenly charged with a new intensity. He shakes his head. “Do you remember if someone touched you while you were on the ground, before the ambulance arrived?” Barthes seems not to understand or perhaps not to hear the question. He shakes his head again: no. “No, you don’t remember?” Another pause, but this time, Bayard thinks he can identify the expression on the man’s face: it is incredulity. Barthes replies no. “Was there any money in your wallet?” Barthes stares at his interrogator. “Monsieur Barthes, can you hear me? Did you have any money on you?” No. “Did you have anything valuable with you?” No response. Barthes’s gaze is so unwavering that were it not for a strange fire in the back of his eyes one would think him dead. “Monsieur Barthes? Did you have something valuable in your possession? Do you think something might have been stolen from you?” The silence that fills the room is broken only by Barthes’s hoarse breathing in the ventilator tube. There’s another long pause. Slowly, Barthes shakes his head, then looks away.

6

On his way out of the hospital, Superintendent Bayard thinks: there’s a problem here. It strikes him that what should have been a routine investigation will perhaps not be completely superfluous, after all; that the disappearance of the papers is a curious gray area in what otherwise looks like an ordinary accident; that he will have to interview more people than he’d imagined in order to clear this up; that his investigation should begin on Rue des Écoles, outside the Collège de France (an institution whose existence was entirely unknown to him before today, and whose nature he therefore hasn’t quite grasped); that he will have to start by meeting this Monsieur Foucault, “professor of the history of systems of thoughts” [sic]; that, after this, he will have to interrogate a whole gang of hairy students, plus the accident witnesses, plus the victim’s friends. He is simultaneously baffled and annoyed by this extra work. But he knows what he saw in that hospital room. What he saw in Barthes’s eyes: fear.

Superintendent Bayard, absorbed by his thoughts, pays no attention to the black DS parked on the other side of the boulevard. He gets in his official vehicle, a Peugeot 504, and heads toward the Collège de France.

7

In the entrance hall, he spots a list of course titles: Nuclear Magnetism, Neuropsychology of Development, Sociography of Southeast Asia, Christianity and Gnosis in the Pre-Islamic East … Perplexed, he goes to the faculty room and asks to see Michel Foucault, only to be told that he is busy giving a class.

The lecture hall is packed. Bayard cannot even get in. He is held back by a solid wall of students, who react furiously when he tries to force his way through. Taking pity on him, one explains in a whisper how it works: if you want a seat, you need to arrive two hours before the lecture starts. When the hall is full, you can always fall back on the hall across the corridor, where the lecture is broadcast over speakers. You won’t get to see Foucault, but at least you’ll hear him speak. So Bayard walks over to Lecture Hall B, which is also pretty full, though there are a few empty seats remaining. The audience is a colorful mix: there are young people, old people, hippies, yuppies, punks, goths, Englishmen in tweed waistcoats, Italian girls with plunging necklines, Iranian women in chadors, grandmothers with their little dogs … He sits next to two young male twins dressed as astronauts (though without the helmets). The atmosphere is studious: people scribble in notebooks or listen reverently. From time to time they cough, as if at the theater, but there is no one on the stage. Through the speakers, the superintendent hears a nasal, slightly 1940s-sounding voice; not Chaban-Delmas exactly, more like a mix of Jean Marais and Jean Poiret, only higher-pitched.

“The problem I would like to pose you,” says the voice, “is this: What is the meaning, within an idea of salvation—in other words, within an idea of illumination, an idea of redemption, granted to men on their first baptism—what could be the meaning of the repetition of penitence, or even the repetition of sin?”

Very professorial: Bayard can sense that. He tries to grasp what the voice is talking about, but unfortunately he makes this effort just as Foucault says: “In such a way that the subject moving toward the truth, and attaching itself to it with love, in his own words manifests a truth that is nothing other than the manifestation in it of the true presence of a God who, Himself, can tell only truth, because He never lies, He is completely honest.”

If Foucault had been speaking that day about prison, or power, or archaeology, or green energy, or genealogy, who knows?… But the implacable voice drones on: “Even if, for various philosophers or views of the universe, the world might well turn in one direction or another, in the life of individuals time has only one direction.” Bayard listens without understanding, rocked gently by the tone, which is simultaneously didactic and projected, melodious in its way, underpinned by a sense of rhythm, an extremely precise use of silences and punctuation.

Does this guy earn more than he does?

“Between this system of law that governs actions and relates to a subject of will, and consequently the indefinite repeatability of the error, and the outline of the salvation and perfection that concerns the subjects, which implies a temporal scansion and an irreversibility, there is, I think, no possible integration…”

Yes, without a doubt. Bayard is unable to suppress the bitterness that instinctively makes him detest this voice. The police have to battle people like this for taxpayers’ funds. They’re functionaries, like him, except that he deserves to be remunerated by society for his work. But this Collège de France, what is it exactly? Founded by François I, okay: he read that in the entrance hall. Then what? Courses open to all, but of interest only to work-shy lefties, retired people, lunatics, or pipe-smoking teachers; improbable subjects that he’s never even heard of before … No degrees, no exams. People like Barthes and Foucault paid to spout a load of woolly nonsense. Bayard is already sure of one thing: no one comes here to learn how to do a job. Episteme, my ass.

When the voice wraps up by giving the date and time of next week’s lecture, Bayard returns to Lecture Hall A, elbows his way through the flood of students pouring out through the swing doors, finally enters the lecture hall, and spots a bald, bespectacled man at the very back of the room wearing a turtleneck sweater under his jacket. He looks at once sturdy and slender. He has a determined jaw with a slight underbite and the stately demeanor of those who know that they are valued by the world. His head is perfectly shaved. Bayard joins him on the stage. “Monsieur Foucault?” The big baldy is gathering his notes in the relaxed manner of a teacher whose work is done. He turns welcomingly toward Bayard, aware of what levels of shyness his admirers must sometimes overcome in order to speak to him. Bayard takes out his card. He, too, is well aware of its effect. Foucault stops dead for a second, looks at the card, stares at the policeman, then goes back to his notes. In a theatrical voice, as if for the attention of what’s left of the audience, he declares: “I refuse to be identified by the authorities.” Bayard pretends he hasn’t heard him: “It’s about the accident.”

The big baldy shoves his notes in his satchel and exits the stage without a word. Bayard runs after him: “Monsieur Foucault, where are you going? I have to ask you a few questions!” Foucault strides up the steps of the lecture hall. He replies without turning around, loud enough for all the remaining students to be able to hear him: “I refuse to be confined by the authorities!” The audience laughs. Bayard grabs his arm: “I just want you to give me your version of the facts.” Foucault stands still and says nothing. His entire body is tensed. He looks down at the hand gripping his arm as if it were the most serious human rights violation since the Cambodian genocide. Bayard does not loosen his hold. There are murmurs around them. After a minute or so of this, Foucault finally speaks: “My version is that they killed him.” Bayard is not sure he’s understood this correctly.

“Killed him? Killed who?”

“My friend Roland.”

“But he’s not dead!”

“He is already dead.”

From behind his glasses, Foucault stares at his interrogator with the intensity of the shortsighted. And slowly, emphasizing each syllable, as if concluding a long argument whose secret logic he alone knows, he announces:

“Roland Barthes is dead.”

“But who killed him?”

“The system, of course!”

The use of the word system confirms to the policeman exactly what he feared: he’s surrounded by lefties. He knows from experience that this is all they talk about: society’s corruption, the class struggle, the “system” … He waits unenthusiastically for the rest of the speech. Foucault, magnanimously, deigns to enlighten him:

“Roland has been mercilessly mocked in recent years. Because he had the power of understanding things as they are and, paradoxically, inventing them with unprecedented freshness, he was criticized for his jargon, he was pastiched, parodied, caricatured, satirized…”

“Do you know if he had enemies?”

“Of course! Ever since he joined the Collège de France—I brought him here—the jealousy has intensified. All he had were enemies: the reactionaries, the middle classes, the fascists, the Stalinists, and, above all, above all, the rancid old critics who never forgave him!”

“Forgave him for what?”

“For daring to think! For daring to question their outdated bourgeois ideas, for highlighting their vile normative functions, for showing them up for what they really were: prostitutes sullied by idiocy and compromised principles!”

“But who, in particular?

“You want names? Who do you think I am? The Picards, the Pommiers, the Rambauds, the Burniers! They’d have executed him themselves given the chance. Twelve bullets in the Sorbonne courtyard, beneath the statue of Victor Hugo!”

Suddenly, Foucault strides off again and Bayard is caught off-guard. The professor gets a head start of several yards, leaves the lecture hall and races up the stairs. Bayard runs after him, close behind. Their footsteps ring loudly on the stone floors. The policeman calls out: “Monsieur Foucault, who are those people you mentioned?” Foucault, without turning around: “Dogs, jackals, mules, morons, nobodies, but above all, above all, above all! the servants of the established order, the scribes of the old world, the pimps of a dead system of thought who seek to make us breathe the stench of its corpse forever with their obscene sniggers.” Bayard, clinging to the banister: “What corpse?” Foucault, storming up the stairs: “The corpse of the dead system of thought!” Then he laughs sardonically. Trying to find a pen in the pockets of his raincoat while keeping up with the professor, Bayard asks him: “Could you spell Rambaud for me?”

8

The superintendent enters a bookstore to buy some books but he is unused to such places and struggles to find his way among the aisles. He cannot find any works by Raymond Picard. The bookseller, who seems relatively knowledgeable, mentions in passing that Raymond Picard is dead—something Foucault had omitted to tell him—but that he can order New Criticism or New Fraud? On the other hand, he does have a copy of Enough Decoding! by René Pommier, a disciple of Raymond Picard who lays into structuralist criticism (that, in any case, is how the bookseller sells him the book, which doesn’t get him much further), and most notably, Roland Barthes Made Easy, by Rambaud and Burnier. This is quite a slim book with a green cover, a photograph of Barthes staring out severely from an orange oval. Coming out of the frame, a Crumb-style cartoon character says “hee-hee,” grinning and laughing, mockingly, one hand over his mouth. In fact, I’ve checked, and it is Crumb. But Bayard has never heard of Fritz the Cat, the countercultural cartoon strip and film, in which black people are saxophone-playing crows and the hero is a cat in a turtleneck who, Kerouac-style, smokes joints and fucks anything that moves in Cadillacs, against a backdrop of urban riots and burning Dumpsters. Crumb is famous, though, for the way he drew women, with their big, powerful thighs, their lumberjack shoulders, their breasts like mortar shells, and their mares’ asses. Bayard is no cartoon-strip connoisseur, and does not make the connection. But he buys the book, and the Pommier, too. He doesn’t order the Picard, because at this stage of the investigation dead authors don’t interest him.

The superintendent sits in a café, orders a beer, lights a Gitane, and opens Roland Barthes Made Easy. (Which café? The little details are important for reconstructing the atmosphere, don’t you think? I see him at the Sorbon, the bar opposite the Champo, the little arthouse cinema at the bottom of Rue des Écoles. But, in all honesty, I don’t have a clue: you can put him wherever you want.) He reads:

R.B. (in his writing, Roland Barthes calls himself R.B.) appeared in its archaic form twenty-five years ago, in the book entitled Writing Degree Zero. Since then it has, little by little, detached itself from French, from which it is partially descended, forming an autonomous language with its own grammar and vocabulary.

Bayard takes a drag on his Gitane, swallows a mouthful of beer, turns the pages. At the bar, he hears the waiter explain to a customer why France will descend into civil war if Mitterrand is elected.

Lesson one: The basics of conversation.

1—How do you formulate yourself?

French: What is your name?

2—I formulate myself L.

French: My name is William.

Bayard more or less understands the satirical intent and also that in theory he ought to be on the same wavelength as the authors of this pastiche, but he is wary. Why, in “R.B.,” does “William” call himself “L”? It’s a puzzle. Fucking intellectuals.

The waiter to the customer: “When the Communists are in power, everyone with money will leave France and put it somewhere else, somewhere they won’t have to pay taxes and where they’re sure they won’t get caught!”

Rambaud and Burnier:

3—What “stipulation” locks in, encloses, organizes, arranges the economy of your pragma like the occultation and/or exploitation of your egg-zistence?

French: What is your job?

4—(I) expel units of code.

French: I am a typist.

This makes him laugh a little, but he hates what he instinctively perceives as a principle of verbal intimidation. Of course, he knows that this kind of book is not aimed at him, that it’s a book for intellectuals, for those smart-assed parasites to have a good snigger among themselves. Mocking themselves: the last laugh. Bayard is no idiot; he’s already doing a bit of a Bourdieu without even realizing it.

At the bar, the speech continues: “Once all the money’s in Switzerland, we won’t have any capital left to pay wages, and it’ll be civil war. And the Socialists and Commies will have won, just like that!” The waiter stops pontificating for a minute to go and serve someone. Bayard returns to his reading:

5—My discourse finds/completes its own textuality through R.B. in a game of smoke and mirrors.

French: I speak fluent Roland Barthes.

Bayard gets the gist: Roland Barthes’s language is gibberish. But in that case why waste your time reading him? And, more to the point, writing a book about him?

6—The “sublimation” (the integration) of this as (my) code constitutes the “third break” of a doubling of cupido, my desire.

French: I would like to learn this language.

7—Does the R.B. as macrology serve as “fenceage” to the enclosed field of Gallicist interpellation?

French: Is Roland Barthes too difficult for a French person to learn?

8—The scarf of Barthesian style tightens “around” the code as it is confirmed in its repetition/duplication.

French: No, it’s pretty easy. But you have to work at it.

The superintendent’s perplexity increases. He doesn’t know who he hates more: Barthes or the two comics who felt the need to parody him. He puts the book down, stubs out his cigarette. The waiter is back behind the bar. Holding his glass of red, the customer objects: “Yeah, but Mitterrand’ll stop them at the border. And the money will be confiscated.” The waiter scolds the customer, frowning: “You think the rich are idiots? They’ll pay professional smugglers. They’ll organize networks to ship their money out. They’ll cross the Alps and the Pyrenees, like Hannibal! Like during the war! If it’s possible to get Jews over the border, they won’t have any trouble getting bundles of cash over, will they?” The customer does not seem too convinced, but as he obviously doesn’t have a comeback he settles for a nod, then finishes his glass and orders another one. The waiter takes out an open bottle of red and puffs himself up: “Oh yes! Oh yes! Personally, I don’t give a toss. If the pinkos win, I’m out of here. I’ll go and work in Geneva. They won’t get my money, no way. Over my dead body! I don’t work for pinkos! What do you take me for? I don’t work for anyone! I’m free! Like de Gaulle!”

Bayard tries to remember who Hannibal is and notes mechanically that the little finger on the waiter’s left hand is missing a phalanx. He interrupts the waiter’s speech to order another beer, opens the René Pommier book, counts the word nonsense seventeen times in four pages, and closes it again. In the meantime, the waiter has begun opining on another subject: “No civilized society can get by without the death penalty!” Bayard pays and exits the café, leaving his change on the table.

He passes the statue of Montaigne without seeing it, crosses Rue des Écoles and enters the Sorbonne. Superintendent Bayard understands that he understands nothing, or at least not much, about all this rubbish. What he needs is someone to explain it to him: a specialist, a translator, a transmitter, a tutor. A professor, basically. At the Sorbonne, he asks where he can find the semiology department. The person at reception sharply replies that there isn’t one. In the courtyard outside, he approaches some students in navy-blue sailor coats and boat shoes to ask where he should go to attend a semiology course. Most of them have no idea what it is or have only vaguely heard of it. But, at last, a long-haired young man smoking a joint beneath the statue of Louis Pasteur tells him that for “semio” he has to go to Vincennes. Bayard is no expert when it comes to academia, but he knows that Vincennes is a university swarming with work-shy lefties and professional agitators. Out of curiosity, he asks this young man why he isn’t there. The man is wearing a large turtleneck sweater, a pair of black trousers with the legs rolled up as though he’s about to go mussel fishing, and purple Dr. Martens. He takes a drag on his joint and replies: “I was there until my second second year. But I was part of a Trotskyite group.” This explanation seems to strike him as sufficient, but when he sees from Bayard’s inquiring look that it isn’t, he adds: “Well, there were, uh, a few problems.”

Bayard does not press the matter. He gets back in his 504 and drives to Vincennes. At a red light, he sees a black DS and thinks: “Now, that was a car!”

9

The 504 joins the ring road at Porte de Bercy, gets off at Porte de Vincennes, goes back up the very long Avenue de Paris, passes the military hospital, refuses to yield to a brand-new blue Fuego driven by some Japanese men, skirts around the chateau, passes the Parc Floral, enters the woods, and parks outside some shack-like buildings that resemble a giant 1970s suburban high school: just about humanity’s worst effort in architectural terms. Bayard, who remembers his distant years spent studying law in the grandeur of Assas, finds this place utterly disorienting: to reach the classrooms, he has to cross a sort of souk run by Africans, step over comatose junkies sprawled on the ground, pass a waterless pond filled with junk, pass crumbling walls covered with posters and graffiti, where he can read: “Professors, students, education officers, ATOS staff: die, bitches!”; “No to closing the food souk”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Nogent”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Marne-la-Vallée”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Savigny-sur-Orge”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Saint-Denis”; “Long live the proletarian revolution”; “Long live the Iranian revolution”; “Maoists = fascists”; “Trotskyites = Stalinists”; “Lacan = cop”; “Badiou = Nazi”; “Althusser = murderer”; “Deleuze = fuck your mother”; “Cixous = fuck me”; “Foucault = Khomeini’s whore”; “Barthes = pro-Chinese social traitor”; “Callicles = SS”; “It is forbidden to forbid forbidding”; “Union de la Gauche = up your ass”; “Come to my place, we’ll read Capital! signed: Balibar” … Students stinking of marijuana accost him aggressively, thrusting thick pamphlets at him: “Comrade, do you know what’s going on in Chile? In El Salvador? Are you concerned about Argentina? And Mozambique? What, you don’t care about Mozambique? Do you know where it is? You want me to tell you about Timor? If not, we’re having a collection for a literacy drive in Nicaragua. Can you buy me a coffee?” Here, he feels less at sea. Back when he was a member of Jeune Nation, he used to beat the crap out of filthy little lefties like these. He throws the tracts in the dried-out pond that serves as a trash can.

Without really knowing how he got there, Bayard ends up at the Culture and Communications department. He scans the list of “course units” displayed on a board in the corridor and finally finds roughly what he came for: Semiology of the Image, a classroom number, a weekly timetable, and the name of a professor—Simon Herzog.

10

“Today, we are going to study figures and letters in James Bond. If you think of James Bond, which letter comes to mind?” Silence, as the students consider the question. At least Jacques Bayard, sitting at the back of the classroom, is familiar with James Bond. “What is the name of James Bond’s boss?” Bayard knows this! He is surprised to find himself wanting to say the answer out loud, but several students get there before him, giving the response simultaneously: M. “Who is M, and why M? What does M signify?” A pause. No answer. “M is an old man, but is a feminine figure. It’s the M of Mother, the nurturing mother, who provides and protects, the one who gets angry when Bond does something silly but who always indulges him, who Bond wants to please by succeeding in his missions. James Bond is a man of action but he is not a lone gunman, he is not on his own, he is not an orphan (he is biographically, but not symbolically: his mother is England; he is not married to his homeland, he is its beloved son). He is supported by a hierarchy, an organization, an entire nation that assigns him impossible missions—which the country takes great pride in him carrying out (M, the metonymical representation of England, the representative of the queen, often repeats that Bond is his best agent: he is the favorite son)—but that provides him with all the material means necessary to accomplish them. James Bond, in fact, has his cake and eats it, too, and that is why he is such a popular fantasy, an extremely powerful contemporary myth: James Bond is the adventurer-functionary. Action and security. He commits offenses, misdemeanors, even crimes, but he is permitted, he has the authority; he won’t be punished because he has the famous ‘license to kill’ signified by his identification number. Which brings us to those three magic figures: 007.

“Double 0 is the code for the right to commit murder, and here we see a brilliant application of the symbolism of figures. How could the license to kill be represented by a figure? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? A million? Death is not quantifiable. Death is nothingness, and nothingness is zero. But murder is more than mere death, it is death inflicted on another. It is death times two: his own inevitable death, whose probability is increased by the dangers of his job (we are often reminded that the life expectancy of double 0 agents is very low), and that of the other. Double 0 is the right to kill and to be killed. As for 7, it was obviously chosen because it is traditionally one of the most elegant numbers, a magical number charged with history and symbolism; but in this case, it complies with two criteria: it is an odd number, of course, like the number of roses we give to a woman, and prime (a prime number is divisible only by one and by itself) in order to express a singularity, a uniqueness, an individuality that confounds the whole impression of interchangeability suggested by an identification number. Let’s cast our minds back to the series The Prisoner, with its protagonist, Number 6, who desperately, rebelliously repeats: ‘I am not a number!’ James Bond, on the other hand, is perfectly comfortable with his number, all the more so as it confers upon him extraordinary privileges, making him an aristocrat (in Her Majesty’s service, naturally). 007 is the antithesis of Number 6: he is satisfied with the extremely privileged place society gives him, he works devotedly for the preservation of the established order, without ever questioning the enemy’s nature or motivation. Where Number 6 is a revolutionary, 007 is a conservative. The reactionary 7 here opposes the revolutionary 6, and as the meaning of the word reactionary supposes the idea of posteriority (the conservatives ‘react’ to the revolution by working for a return to the ancien régime, i.e., the established order), it is logical that the reactionary figure succeeds the revolutionary figure (to put it as plainly as possible: that James Bond is not 005). The function of 007 is, therefore, to guarantee the return of the established order, threatened by a menace that destabilizes the world order. The end of each episode coincides always with a return to ‘normality,’ i.e., ‘the old order.’ Umberto Eco calls James Bond a fascist. In actual fact, we can see that he is, above all, a reactionary…”

A student raises his hand: “But there’s also Q, the guy in charge of gadgets. Do you see a meaning in that letter too?”

With an immediacy that surprises Bayard, the professor goes on:

“Q is a paternal figure, because he is the one who provides James Bond with weapons and teaches him how to use them. He passes on his savoir faire. In this sense, he ought to be called F, for Father … But if you watch the scenes involving Q carefully, what do you see? A distracted, impertinent, playful James Bond, who doesn’t listen (or pretends not to). And, at the end, you have Q, who always asks: ‘Questions?’ (or variations on the theme of ‘Do you understand?’). But James Bond never has any questions; although he plays the dunce, he has assimilated what has been explained to him perfectly because he is an extraordinarily quick study. So Q is the q of ‘questions’—questions that Q calls for and that Bond never asks, except in the form of jokes, and his questions are never those that Q is expecting.”

Another student speaks up now: “And in English, Q is pronounced exactly the same way as the word queue, which implies shopping. People queue outside the gadget store, they wait to be served; it is a dead time, a playful time, between two action scenes.”

The young professor waves his arms enthusiastically: “Exactly! Well observed! That’s a very good idea! Don’t forget that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry. And the same’s true even for a letter, you see.”

The professor looks at his watch: “Thank you for your attention. Next Tuesday we’ll talk about clothes in James Bond. Gentlemen, I’ll expect you in tuxedos, naturally [laughter in the classroom]. And ladies, in Ursula Andress–style bikinis [men whistling, women protesting]. See you next week!”

While the students leave the hall, Bayard goes up to the young lecturer with a discreetly malicious smile that the lecturer does not understand, but which means: “I’m going to make you pay for that baldy’s bad attitude.”

11

“Just to be clear, Superintendent, I am not a specialist in Barthes, nor strictly speaking am I a semiologist. I have an MAS in modern criticism of the historical novel, I’m preparing a linguistics thesis on acts of language, and I also run a tutorial. This semester, I’m giving a specialized course in semiology of the image, and last year I ran an introductory course on semiology for first-year students. I taught them the basics of linguistics because that’s the foundation of semiology; I told them about Saussure and Jakobson, a bit of Austin, a bit of Searle; we worked mainly on Barthes because he’s the most accessible and because he often chose his subjects from popular culture, which are more likely to pique my students’ interest than, say, his critiques of Racine or Chateaubriand, because these kids are doing media studies, not literature. With Barthes, we could spend a lot of time discussing steak-frites, the latest Citroën, James Bond … it’s a more playful approach to analysis, and that is in a sense the definition of semiology: it applies literary criticism methods to nonliterary subjects.”

“He’s not dead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘we could.’ You were talking in the past tense, as if it were no longer possible.”

“Um, no, that’s not what I meant…”

Simon Herzog and Jacques Bayard walk side by side down the university’s corridors. The young lecturer holds his satchel in one hand and a sheaf of photocopies in the other. He shakes his head when a student tries to hand him a leaflet. The student calls him a fascist, and he responds with a guilty smile, then corrects Bayard:

“Even if he did die, we could still apply his critical methods, you know…”

“What makes you think he might die? I didn’t mention the seriousness of his injuries.”

“Well, er, I doubt whether superintendents are sent to investigate all road accidents, so I deduce from that that it’s serious, and that there’s something fishy about the circumstances.”

“The circumstances are pretty straightforward, and the victim’s condition is really nothing to be worried about.”

“Really? Ah, well, I’m glad to hear it, superintendent…”

“I didn’t tell you I was a superintendent.”

“No? I just thought Barthes was so famous that the police would send a superintendent…”

“I’d never even heard of this guy until yesterday.”

The young postgrad falls silent. He looks disconcerted; Bayard is satisfied. A student in socks and sandals hands him another tract: Waiting for Godard: A One-Act Play. He puts it in his pocket and asks Herzog:

“What do you know about semiology?”

“Um, well, it’s the study of the life of signs within society.”

Bayard thinks about his Roland Barthes Made Easy. He grits his teeth.

“And in plain French?”

“But … that’s Saussure’s definition…”

“This Chaussure, does he know Barthes?”

“Er, no, he’s dead. He was the inventor of semiology.”

“Hmm, I see.”

But Bayard does not see anything. The two men walk through the cafeteria. It looks like the ruins of a warehouse and smells strongly of merguez sausage, pancakes, and marijuana. A tall, awkward-looking guy in mauve lizard-skin boots is standing on a table. Cigarette in mouth, beer in hand, he harangues some students who listen, eyes shining. As Simon Herzog has no office, he invites Bayard to sit down and, automatically, offers him a cigarette. Bayard refuses, takes out a Gitane, and says:

“So, in concrete terms, what’s the point of this … science?”

“Um, well … understanding reality?”

Bayard grimaces imperceptibly.

“Meaning?”

The young lecturer takes a few seconds to think about this. He gauges his interrogator’s capacities for abstraction—clearly quite limited—and adapts his response accordingly. If not, they’ll be going around in circles for hours.

“In fact, it’s simple. There are loads of things in our environment that have, uh, a function of use. You see?”

Hostile silence from the policeman. At the other end of the room, the guy in mauve lizard-skin boots is telling his young disciples about the events of May ’68, which, in his account, sound like a mixture of Mad Max and Woodstock. Simon Herzog tries to keep his explanation as simple as possible: “A chair is for sitting on, a table is for eating on, a desk for working at, clothes for keeping warm, et cetera. Okay?”

Icy silence.

“Except that, in addition to their function of … um, their usefulness … these objects also possess a symbolic value … as if they could speak, if you like: they tell us things. That chair, for example, that you’re sitting on, with its zero design, its low-quality varnished wood, and its rusted frame, tells us that we are in a community that doesn’t care about comfort or aesthetics and that has no money. Added to this, those mingled smells of bad food and cannabis confirm that we’re in a higher-education establishment. In the same way, your manner of dressing signals your profession: you wear a suit, which indicates an executive job, but your clothes are cheap, which implies a modest salary and/or an absence of interest in your appearance; so you belong to a profession in which presentation doesn’t matter, or not very much. Your shoes are badly scuffed, and you came here in a car, which signifies that you are not deskbound—you are out and about in your job. An executive who leaves his office is very likely to be assigned some kind of inspection work.”

“I see,” says Bayard. (A long silence, during which Herzog can hear the man in lizard-skin boots telling his fascinated audience how, back when he was head of the Armed Spinozist Faction, he defeated the Young Hegelians.) “Then again, I know where I am, because there’s a sign saying ‘University of Vincennes—Paris 8’ over the entrance. And the word ‘Police’ is also written in bold on the red, white, and blue card I showed you when I came to talk to you after your lecture, so I don’t really see where you’re going with this.”

Simon Herzog starts to sweat. This conversation brings back painful memories of oral exams. Don’t panic, just concentrate. Don’t focus on the seconds passing in silence; ignore the falsely sanctimonious attitude of the sadistic examiner who is secretly enjoying his institutional superiority and the suffering he’s inflicting on you because in the past he suffered the same himself. The young postgrad thinks fast, attentively observing the man facing him, and proceeds methodically, stage by stage, as he’s been taught. Then, when he feels ready, he lets a few further seconds pass, and says:

“You fought in Algeria; you have been married twice; you are separated from your second wife; you have a daughter under twenty, with whom you have a difficult relationship; you voted for Giscard in both rounds of the last presidential election, and you’ll do the same again next year; you lost a colleague in the line of duty, perhaps it was your own fault, in any case you blame yourself or feel bad about it, though your superiors decided it was not your responsibility. And you went to see the latest James Bond film at the cinema, but you prefer a good Maigret on TV or films starring Lino Ventura.”

A very, very long silence. At the other end of the room, the reincarnation of Spinoza is recounting, to the cheers of the crowd, how he and his gang overcame the Fourier Rose group. Bayard mutters tonelessly:

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, it’s very simple!” (Another pause, but this one is the young professor’s. Bayard does not react at all, except for a slight quivering in the fingers of his right hand. The man in mauve lizard-skin boots starts singing a Rolling Stones song a cappella.) “When you came to see me at the end of the lecture earlier, you instinctively placed yourself in a position where you wouldn’t have your back to the door or the window. You don’t learn that at police school, but in the army. The fact that this reflex has stayed with you signifies that your military experience was not limited to the usual National Service but marked you sufficiently that you have kept some unconscious habits. So you probably went to war and you’re not old enough to have fought in Indochina, so I think you were sent to Algeria. You’re in the police, so you’re bound to be right-wing, as confirmed by your hostility to students and intellectuals (which was plain from the minute we started talking), but as an Algerian veteran you considered de Gaulle’s granting of independence as a betrayal. So you refused to vote for the Gaullist candidate, Chaban, and you are too rational (a condition of your job) to give your vote to a candidate like Le Pen, who has no chance of making it through to the second round, so your vote naturally went to Giscard. You came here alone, against all the rules of the French police, where officers always go about in twos, so you must have been given special dispensation, a favor that could only have been granted for a serious reason such as the death of a colleague. The trauma is such that you cannot bear the idea of having a new partner, so your superiors allow you to operate solo. That way, you can pretend to be Maigret, who, judging from your raincoat, is a role model, consciously or not. (Superintendent Moulin, with his leather jacket, is probably too young for you to identify with, and, well, you don’t have enough money to dress like James Bond.) You wear a wedding ring on your right hand, but you still have a ring mark on your left ring finger. You presumably wished to avoid the feeling that you were repeating yourself by changing your ring hand for the second marriage, as a way of warding off fate, or something like that. But apparently it didn’t work, because your rumpled shirt, this early in the day, proves that no one is doing the ironing at your house; and, in conformity with the petit-bourgeois model, which fits your sociocultural background, if your wife were still living with you, she would not have let you leave the house wearing an unironed shirt.”

The silence that follows this speech feels as if it might last twenty-four hours.

“And my daughter?”

With an air of false modesty, Herzog waves this invitation away. “It would take too long to explain.”

In fact, he was carried away by his momentum. He just thought a daughter seemed to fit the picture he had painted.

“All right. Follow me.”

“I beg your pardon? Follow you where? Am I under arrest?”

“I’m requisitioning you. You strike me as being less stupid than the rest of these long-haired louts, and I need a translator for all this bullshit.”

“But … I’m sorry, but that’s completely impossible! I have a class to prepare for tomorrow, and I have to work on my thesis, and there’s a book I have to take back to the library…”

“Listen, you little jerk: you’re coming with me. Got it?”

“Where?”

“We’re going to interrogate the suspects.”

“The suspects? But I thought it was an accident!”

“I meant the witnesses. Let’s go.”

The horde of young fans gathered around the man in boots chants “Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Spinoza fucks Hegel up the arse! Down with dialectics!” On his way out, Bayard and his new assistant stand aside to let a group of Maoists pass; apparently they have decided to beat up the Spinozists.

12

Roland Barthes lived on Rue Servandoni, next to the Saint-Sulpice church, a stone’s throw from the Jardin du Luxembourg. I am going to park where I suppose Bayard parked his 504, outside the front door of number 11. I’ll spare you the now obligatory copy-and-paste of the Wikipedia page: the private mansion designed by such-and-such Italian architect for such-and-such Breton bishop, and so on.

It’s a handsome building, nice white stone, impressive wrought-iron gate. Outside the gate, a Vinci employee is installing an entry keypad. (Vinci is not yet called Vinci and belongs to CGE, the Compagnie Générale d’Electricité, later known as Alcatel, but Simon Herzog can’t know anything about all this.) They have to cross the courtyard and take Staircase B, on the right, just after the concierge’s office. Herzog asks Bayard what they are looking for here. Bayard has no idea. They climb the stairs because there is no elevator.

The decoration in the third-floor apartment is old-fashioned. There are wooden clocks, it’s very neatly kept, very clean, even the room that serves as an office—next to the bed is a transistor radio and a copy of Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb—but Barthes worked mostly in his attic room, on the seventh floor.

In the sixth-floor apartment, the two men are welcomed by Barthes’s younger brother and his wife—an Arab, notes Bayard; pretty, notes Simon—who invites them in for tea. The younger brother explains that the apartments on the third and sixth floor are identical. For a while, Barthes, his mother, and his younger brother lived on the sixth floor, but when his mother fell ill she became too weak to climb all those stairs, so—as the third-floor apartment was available—Barthes bought it and moved in there with her. Roland Barthes had a wide social circle, he went out frequently, especially after their mother’s death, but the younger brother says he doesn’t know any of the people he hung around with. All he knows is that he often went to the Café de Flore, where he had work meetings and where he also met up with friends.

The seventh floor is actually two adjoining attic rooms knocked into one to create a small studio apartment. There is a trestle table that acts as a desk, an iron-framed bed, a kitchenette with a box of Japanese tea on top of the refrigerator. There are books everywhere, empty coffee cups next to half-full ashtrays. It is older, dirtier, and messier, but it does have a piano, a turntable, some classical music records (Schumann, Schubert), and shoeboxes containing files, keys, gloves, maps, press cuttings.

A trapdoor allows entry directly into the sixth-floor apartment without going out onto the landing.

On the wall, Simon Herzog recognizes the strange photographs from Camera Lucida, Barthes’s latest book, which has just come out—among them, the yellowed snapshot of a little girl in a sunroom: his beloved mother.

Bayard asks Herzog to take a look through the files and the library. Like any book lover entering someone’s home for the first time, even if they’ve not gone there for that reason, Herzog is already curiously examining the books in the library: Proust, Pascal, de Sade, more Chateaubriand, not many contemporary writers, apart from a few works by Sollers, Kristeva, and Robbe-Grillet, and various dictionaries, critical works, Todorov, Genette, and books about linguistics, Saussure, Austin, Searle … There is a sheet of paper in the typewriter on the desk. Simon Herzog reads the title: “We always fail to talk about what we love.” He quickly scans the text—it’s about Stendhal. Simon is moved by the thought of Barthes sitting at this desk, thinking about Stendhal, about love, about Italy, completely unaware that every hour spent typing this article was bringing him closer to the moment when he would be knocked over by a laundry van.

Next to the typewriter is a copy of Jakobson’s Linguistics and Poetics; inside it, a bookmark that makes Simon Herzog think of a stopped watch found on a victim’s wrist: when Barthes was knocked over by the van, this is what was going through his mind. As it happens, he was rereading the chapter on the functions of language. Barthes’s bookmark was actually a sheet of paper folded in four. Simon Herzog unfolds the sheet: notes scrawled in small, dense handwriting, which he doesn’t even try to decipher. He folds the sheet up without reading it and carefully puts it back in the right place, so that when Barthes comes home he will be able to find his page.

Close to the edge of the desk are a few opened letters, lots of unopened letters, other pages covered with scribbles in the same dense handwriting, a few copies of the Nouvel Observateur, newspaper articles, and photographs cut from magazines. Cigarette butts are piled up like firewood. Simon Herzog feels overwhelmed by sadness. While Bayard rummages around under the little iron bed, he bends to look through the window. Down on the street, he spots a black DS double-parked and he smiles at the symbolism. The DS was the emblem of Barthes’s Mythologies, and the most famous, the one he chose for the cover of his celebrated collection of articles. He hears a hammering sound from below: the Vinci employee is chiseling a notch in the stone that will house the metal keyboard. The sky has turned white. Above the rooftops, below the horizon, he can make out the trees of the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Bayard tears him from his reverie by dropping a stack of magazines on the desk. He found them under the bed. They are not back issues of the Nouvel Obs. With a snarl of satisfaction, he says to Simon: “He liked cock, this intellectual!” Spread out before him, Simon Herzog sees magazine covers featuring young, muscular naked men, posing and staring out insolently at him. I’m not sure how widely known Barthes’s homosexuality was at the time. When he wrote his bestseller, A Lover’s Discourse, he took care never to characterize his love object in terms of gender, striving to use neutral formulations such as “the partner” or “the other” (both of which, for what it’s worth, are masculine words in French, meaning that the pronoun is always “he”). Unlike Foucault, whose homosexuality was very open, almost as a form of protest, I know that Barthes was very discreet, perhaps ashamed, in any case very preoccupied with keeping up appearances, until his mother’s death at least. Foucault wanted him to be more open, and despised him a little for his reserve, I think. But I don’t know if there were rumors in university circles or among the wider public, or whether everyone knew. Anyway, if Simon Herzog was aware of Barthes’s homosexuality, he hadn’t thought it necessary to inform Superintendent Bayard at this stage of the inquiry.

Just as the sniggering policeman is opening the centerfold of a magazine named Gai Pied, the telephone rings. Bayard stops. He puts the magazine on the desk without bothering to close it, and freezes. He looks at Simon Herzog, who looks back at him, while the handsome youth in the photograph grips his cock and looks out at both of them and the telephone continues to ring. Bayard lets it ring a few more times and picks up the receiver without a word. Simon watches as he remains silent for several seconds. He also hears the silence on the other end of the line and instinctively stops breathing. When Bayard finally says “Hello” there is an audible click, followed by the “beep-beep” that indicates the call has been ended. Bayard hangs up, puzzled. Simon Herzog asks stupidly: “Wrong number?” In the street, through the open window, they hear a car engine start. Bayard takes the porn magazines and the two men leave the room. Simon Herzog thinks: “I should have closed the window. It’s going to rain.” Jacques Bayard thinks: “Fucking queer intellectual bastards…”

They ring the bell at the concierge’s office to return the keys, but no one answers. The workman installing the keypad offers to give them back to the concierge when she returns, but Bayard prefers to go back upstairs and hand them to the younger brother.

When he comes back down, Simon Herzog is smoking a cigarette with the workman, who’s taking a break. Out in the street, Bayard does not get back in the 504. “Where are we going?” Simon Herzog asks him. “To the Café de Flore,” replies Bayard. “Did you notice, the guy installing the keypad?” Simon says. “He had a Slav accent, didn’t he?” Bayard grumbles: “As long as he’s not driving a tank, I couldn’t care less.” As they cross Place Saint-Sulpice, the two men pass a blue Fuego and Bayard says, with the air of an expert: “That’s the new Renault. It’s only just gone on sale.” Simon Herzog thinks automatically that the workers who built this car wouldn’t be able to afford it even if ten of them got together. And, lost in his Marxist thoughts, doesn’t pay attention to the two Japanese men inside the car.

13

At the Flore, they see a man squinting through thick glasses, seated next to a little blonde. He looks sickly, and his froglike face is vaguely familiar to Bayard, but he is not the reason they are there. Bayard spots some men in their twenties and goes over to talk to them. Most are gigolos who pick up clients in the area. Do they know Barthes? Yes, all of them. Bayard interrogates them a bit while Simon Herzog observes Sartre out of the corner of his eye: he is definitely not in good shape; he keeps coughing as he smokes his cigarette. Françoise Sagan pats his back solicitously. The last one to have seen Barthes is a young Moroccan: the great critic was negotiating with a new guy, he doesn’t know his name, they left together the other day, he doesn’t know what they did or where they went or where he lives but he knows where they can find him tonight: at the Bains Diderot, a sauna at the Gare de Lyon. “A sauna?” Simon Herzog asks, surprised, when suddenly a scarf-wearing maniac appears and begins yelling at anyone who will listen: “Look at them! Look at their faces! They won’t look like that much longer! Seriously, I’m telling you: a bourgeois must reign or die! Drink! Drink your Fernet to the health of your company! Enjoy it while you can! Drink to your downfall! Long live Bokassa!” A few conversations come to an abrupt halt. The regulars observe this newcomer gloomily, and the tourists try to enjoy the show without really understanding what it’s about, but the waiters ignore it and continue serving. His arm sweeps the room in theatrical outrage and, addressing an imaginary opponent, the scarf-wearing prophet proclaims victoriously: “No need to run, comrade. The old world is ahead of you!”

Bayard asks who this man is; the gigolo tells him it is Jean-Edern Hallier, some aristocratic writer who is always making a fuss and who reckons he will be a minister if Mitterrand wins next year. Bayard notes the inverted-V mouth, the shining blue eyes, the typical upper-class accent that verges on mispronunciation. He returns to his questioning: What is this new guy like? The young Moroccan describes him as an Arab with a southern accent, a small earring, and hair that falls over his face. Still shouting at the top of his voice, Jean-Edern haphazardly extols the virtues of ecology, euthanasia, independent radio stations, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Simon Herzog watches Sartre watching Jean-Edern. When the aristocrat notices that Sartre is there, he starts to tremble. Sartre stares at him contemplatively. Françoise Sagan whispers into his ear, like a simultaneous translator. Jean-Edern narrows his eyes, which makes him look even more weasel-like under his thick, frizzy hair, is silent for a few seconds, apparently thinking, and then starts shouting again: “Existentialism is a contagion! Long live the third sex! Long live the fourth! Don’t despair, La Coupole!” Bayard explains to Simon Herzog that he must come with him to the Bains Diderot to help him find this unknown gigolo. Jean-Edern Hallier goes over to stand in front of Sartre, holds his arm up in the air, hand flat, clicks his loafers together, and yells: “Heil Althusser!” Simon Herzog protests that his presence is not absolutely essential. Sartre coughs and lights another Gitane. Bayard says, on the contrary, a queer little intellectual will be very useful in locating the suspect. Jean-Edern starts singing obscene lyrics to the tune of “The Internationale.” Simon Herzog says it’s too late to buy a pair of swimming trunks. Bayard laughs and tells him there’s no need. Sartre unfolds Le Monde and starts doing the crossword. (As he is almost blind, it is Françoise Sagan who reads the clues to him.) Jean-Edern spots something in the street and rushes outside, yelling: “Modernity, I shit on you!” It is already seven o’clock, and night has fallen. Superintendent Bayard and Simon Herzog go back to the 504, parked outside Barthes’s apartment block. Bayard yanks three or four parking tickets from under the windshield wiper and they head off toward Place de la République, followed by a black DS and a blue Fuego.

14

Jacques Bayard and Simon Herzog walk through sauna steam, little white towels tied around their waists, amid sweaty figures who furtively brush against one another. The superintendent left his card in the changing room, so they are incognito. The aim of the game is not to scare off the gigolo with the earring, if they find him.

In truth, they make a fairly credible couple: the old, beefy, hairy-chested guy, looking around inquisitively, and the skinny, young, clean-shaven one, who glances at his surroundings surreptitiously. Simon Herzog, looking like a frightened anthropologist, excites some lustful looks—the men who pass him stare for a long time, and circle back toward him—but Bayard gets a fair amount of attention too. Two or three young men shoot him flirtatious glances, and a fat man stares from a distance, fist balled around his penis: apparently the Lino Ventura look has its fans here. If Bayard is angry that this gaggle of queers can take him for one of them, he is professional enough to conceal it, merely adopting a faintly hostile expression intended to discourage approaches.

The complex is divided into different spaces: the sauna itself, a Turkish bath, a swimming pool, back rooms in various configurations. The fauna is quite varied too: all ages, all sizes, all degrees of corpulence are here. But in terms of what the superintendent and his assistant are searching for, there is a problem: half of the men here are wearing an earring, and for the under-30s the figure reaches almost 100 percent, nearly all of whom are North Africans. Unfortunately, the description of the man’s hair is not much more useful: young men with bangs over their eyes are undetectable in here because it’s a natural reflex to slick back wet hair.

And so to the final clue: the southern accent. But that requires, at some point, verbal contact.

In the corner of the sauna, on a tiled bench, two youths are kissing and wanking each other off. Bayard leans over them discreetly to check whether either is wearing an earring. They both are. But if they were gigolos, would they really be wasting their time on each other? It’s possible. Bayard has never worked for the vice squad and is no specialist when it comes to this kind of behavior. He takes Simon on a tour of the premises. It’s difficult to see much: the steam forms a thick fog, and some men are hidden away in back rooms where they can be observed only through barred windows. They pass an apparently half-witted Arab who tries to touch everyone’s dicks, two Japanese men, two guys with mustaches and greasy hair, fat tattooed men, lascivious old men, velvet-eyed young men. The sauna’s clients wear their towels around their waists or over their shoulders; everyone in the pool is naked; some have hard-ons, others don’t. Here, too, all sizes and shapes are on display. Bayard tries to spot earring wearers and, when he’s found four or five, he points one out to Simon and orders him to go and talk to the man.

Simon Herzog knows perfectly well that it would make more sense for Bayard to approach the gigolo rather than him but, seeing the cop’s blank face, he realizes it would be pointless to argue. Awkwardly, he walks over to the gigolo and says good evening. His voice quavers. The gigolo smiles but does not reply. Outside his classroom, Simon Herzog is naturally shy, and he has never been much of a ladies’ man (or a man’s man, for that matter). He manages to make a few banal comments that immediately sound inappropriate or merely ridiculous. Without a word, the gigolo takes his hand and leads him toward the back rooms. All strength gone, Simon follows him. He knows he has to react quickly. In a toneless voice, he asks: “What’s your name?” The man replies: “Patrick.” No o or eu to help him detect a southern accent, and no use of the telltale word con. Simon follows him into a little cell where the young man grabs his hips and kneels down in front of him. In the hope of making him pronounce a full sentence, Simon stammers: “Wouldn’t you prefer it if I went first?” The gigolo says no and his hand moves under Simon’s towel. Simon shivers. The towel falls. With surprise, Simon notices that his cock, touched by the young man’s fingers, is not completely flaccid. So he decides to go for broke: “Hang on! You know what I’d like to do?” “What?” the other asks. Still not enough syllables to detect his accent. “I’d like to shit on you!” The gigolo looks surprised. “Can I?” And finally Patrick replies, without even a hint of a southern accent: “All right, but it’ll be more expensive!” Simon Herzog picks up his towel and rushes out, calling: “Never mind! Another time?” If he has to do the same with the dozen potential gigolos patrolling the club, this could be a very long night. He passes the half-witted Arab again, who tries to touch his dick, and the two men with mustaches, the two Japanese men, the fat tattooed men, the velvet-eyed youths, and rejoins Bayard just as a loud, nasal, professorial voice intones: “A functionary of the powers that be showing off his repressive muscles in the service of biopower? What could be more normal?”

Behind Bayard, a wiry, square-jawed, bald man is sitting, naked, arms outstretched and resting on the back of a wooden bench, legs spread wide, being sucked off by a skinny young man who does have an earring but also has short hair. “Have you found anything interesting, Superintendent?” asks Michel Foucault, staring at Simon Herzog.

Bayard conceals his surprise, but doesn’t know how to respond. Simon Herzog’s eyes open wide. The silence is filled with the echoes of cries and moans from back rooms. The mustachioed men hold hands in the shadows, stealthily observing Bayard, Herzog, and Foucault. The Arab dick-toucher wanders around. The Japanese pretend to go for a swim in the pool with their towels on their heads. The tattooed men accost the velvet-eyed youths, or vice versa. Michel Foucault questions Bayard: “What do you think of this place, Superintendent?” Bayard does not reply. No sound but the echoes from the back rooms. “Ahh! Ahh!” Foucault: “You came here to find someone, but it looks to me like you’ve already found him.” He points to Simon Herzog and laughs: “Your Alcibiades!” The back rooms: “Ahh! Ahh!” Bayard: “I’m looking for someone who saw Roland Barthes not long before his accident.” Foucault, caressing the head of the young man hard at work between his legs: “Roland had a secret, you know…” Bayard asks what it was. The back-room panting grows louder. Foucault explains to Bayard that Barthes had a Western understanding of sex, i.e., something simultaneously secret and whose secret must be uncovered. “Roland Barthes,” he says, “is the ewe that wanted to be a shepherd. And was! That’s as brilliant as it gets! But for everyone else … as far as sex is concerned, he always remained a ewe.” The back rooms moo. “Oh! Oh! Ooh! Ooh!” The Arab groper tries to slip his hand under Simon’s towel, but is gently pushed away, so he goes over to the mustachioed men. “Essentially,” says Foucault, “Roland had a Christian temperament. He came here like the first Christians went to Mass: uncomprehendingly but fervently. He believed in it without knowing why.” (In the back rooms: “Yes! Yes!) “Homosexuality disgusts you, doesn’t it, Superintendent?” (“Harder! Harder!”) “And yet it was you who created us. The notion of male homosexuality didn’t exist in Ancient Greece: Socrates could bugger Alcibiades without being seen as a pederast. The Greeks had a more elevated notion of the corruption of youth…”

Foucault throws back his head, eyes closed. Neither Bayard nor Herzog can tell if he’s abandoning himself to pleasure or thinking. And still the back-room chorus rises in volume: “Oh! Oh!”

Foucault opens his eyes, as if he’s just remembered something: “And yet the Greeks had their limits too. They used to deny the young boy his share of pleasure. They couldn’t forbid it, of course, but they couldn’t conceive of it, and in the end, they did what we do: they excluded it through decorum.” (The back rooms: “No! No! No!”) “At the end of the day decorum is always the most effective means of coercion…” He points at his crotch: “This is not a pipe, as Magritte would say, ha ha!” He pulls up on the head of the young man, who is still pumping away conscientiously: “But you like sucking me, don’t you, Hamed?” The young man nods carefully. Foucault looks at him tenderly and says, stroking his cheek, “Short hair suits you.” The young man smiles and replies, in a strong southern accent: “Thanks a lot!”

Bayard and Herzog prick up their ears. They are not sure they heard him correctly, but the boy adds: “You’re a nice guy, Michel, and you have a really lovely dick, con!”

15

Yes, he saw Roland Barthes, a few days ago. No, they didn’t really have sexual relations. Barthes called it “boating.” But he wasn’t very active. More the sentimental type. Barthes bought him an omelet at La Coupole and afterward insisted on taking him back to his attic room. They drank tea. They didn’t talk about anything special; Barthes was not very chatty. He seemed pensive. Before he left, Barthes asked him: “What would you do if you ruled the world?” The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: “Even grammar?”

16

It is relatively calm in the lobby of Pitié-Salpêtrière. Friends, admirers, acquaintances, and the merely curious line up to sit at the great man’s bedside; they fill the hospital foyer, conversing in undertones, a cigarette or a sandwich or a newspaper in hand, or a book by Guy Debord or a Milan Kundera novel. Suddenly, three figures appear: a small-waisted woman, short-haired, full of energy, flanked by two men; one in a white shirt open to the navel and a long black coat, black hair billowing, and the other, beige-haired, birdlike, a cigarette holder between his lips.

The formation moves resolutely through the crowd. You can tell that something is about to happen. It’s all a bit Operation Overlord. They plow into the coma wing. The people there to see Barthes look at one another, and the other visitors do the same. Barely five minutes have passed before the first yells are heard: “They’re letting him die! They’re letting him die!”

The three avenging angels return from the kingdom of the dead raging: “This is a place for the dying! It’s a scandal! Who are they trying to fool? Why didn’t anyone warn us? If only we’d been there!” It’s a shame there is no photographer in the room to immortalize this great moment in the history of French intellectuals: Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Bernard-Henri Lévy upbraiding the hospital staff for the disgraceful way they are treating a patient as prestigious as their great friend Roland Barthes.

Maybe you’ll be surprised by the presence of BHL but, even back then, he is always where the action is. Barthes supported him as a “new philosopher” in slightly vague but nevertheless relatively official terms, and Deleuze took him to task for it. According to his friends Barthes was always weak, he never knew how to say no. When Barbarism with a Human Face comes out in 1977, BHL sends him a copy and he gives a polite response praising the book’s style, while not lingering on its substance. No matter: BHL has the letter published in Les Nouvelles littéraires, teams up with Sollers, and here he is three years later, raising his voice in the Salpêtrière in a show of noisy concern for his friend the great critic.

Now, while he and his two acolytes continue making a scene by barking at the poor medical staff (“He must be transferred immediately! To the American Hospital! Call Neuilly!”), two figures in ill-fitting suits sneak down the corridor unnoticed. Jacques Bayard watches, baffled and slightly stunned, as the tall, dark-haired man whirls about and the two others squawk. Beside him, Simon Herzog, fulfilling the task he was requisitioned for, explains to Bayard who these people are, while the three avengers bang on, moving through the lobby in a grid pattern that appears erratic but which I wouldn’t be surprised to discover actually obeys some obscure tactical choreography.

They are still barking (“Do you know who he is? Are you going to pretend that Roland Barthes can be treated like any other patient?” It’s always the same with people like that, expecting privileges because of who they are…) when the two badly dressed figures reappear in the lobby before discreetly slipping away. And they are still there when a terrified nurse runs in, a blonde with slender legs who whispers something in the doctor’s ear. Cue a mass movement: people push past one another, charge down the corridor, rush into Barthes’s room. The great critic is lying on the floor, the tube and all his wires torn out, his flabby buttocks visible under the paper-thin hospital tunic. He groans as he is turned over and his eyes roll frantically, but when he sees Superintendent Jacques Bayard, who is standing among the doctors, he sits up, in a superhuman effort, grabs the policeman’s jacket, forcing him to squat down, and pronounces weakly but distinctly, in his famous bass voice, only broken now and as if he is hiccupping:

“Sophia! Elle sait…”

But what does Sophia know?

In the doorway he sees Kristeva, next to the blond nurse. His eyes are fixed on her for several long seconds, and everyone in the room—doctors, nurses, friends, policeman—is frozen, paralyzed, by the intensity of his distraught gaze. Then he loses consciousness.

Outside, a black DS races off with a screech of tires. Simon Herzog, who has remained in the lobby, pays no attention.

Bayard asks Kristeva: “Sophia, that’s you?” Kristeva says no. But as he just stands there waiting, she eventually adds—pronouncing it the French way, with the j and the u palatalized—“My name is Julia.” Bayard can vaguely detect her foreign accent; he thinks she must be Italian, or German, or maybe Greek, or Brazilian, or Russian. He finds her face harsh; he doesn’t like the piercing look she gives him; he is well aware that those little black eyes want him to understand that she is an intelligent woman, more intelligent than he is, and that she despises him for being a stupid cop. Mechanically, he asks: “Profession?” And when she replies disdainfully, “Psychoanalyst,” he instinctively wants to slap her, but he suppresses the urge. He still has the two others to question.

The blond nurse puts Barthes back in his bed. He is still unconscious. Bayard puts two policemen on guard outside the room and forbids all visits until further notice. Then he turns to the two clowns.

Last name, first name, age, profession.

Joyaux, Philippe, aka Sollers, forty-three, writer, married to Julia Joyaux née Kristeva.

Lévy, Bernard-Henri, thirty-one, philosopher, former École Normale Supérieure student.

The two men were not in Paris when it happened. Barthes and Sollers were very close … Barthes contributed to Sollers’s magazine Tel Quel, and they went to China together with Julia a few years ago … To do what? A study trip … Bloody Communists, thinks Bayard. Barthes wrote several articles praising Sollers’s work … Barthes is like a father for Sollers, even if Barthes behaves like a little boy at times … And Kristeva? Barthes said one day that if he liked women, he would be in love with Julia … He adored her … And you weren’t jealous, Monsieur Joyaux? Ha ha ha … Julia and I, we don’t have that kind of relationship … And anyway, poor Roland, he already had enough problems with men … Why? He didn’t know how to handle things … He always got taken for a ride!… I see. And you, Monsieur Lévy? I admire him greatly, he’s a great man. Did you travel with him too? I was going to suggest several projects to him. What sort of projects? A project for a film about the life of Charles Baudelaire; I was planning to offer him the title role. A project for a joint interview with Solzhenitsyn. A project to petition NATO to liberate Cuba. Could you provide any evidence to substantiate these claims? Yes, of course, I spoke to Andre Glucksmann about them—he’s a witness. Did Barthes have any enemies? Yes, lots, replies Sollers. Everyone knows he’s our friend and we have lots of enemies! Who? The Stalinists! The fascists! Alain Badiou! Gilles Deleuze! Pierre Bourdieu! Cornelius Castoriadis! Pierre Vidal-Naquet! Uh, Hélène Cixous! (BHL: Oh, really? Did she and Julia fall out? Sollers: Yes … well, no … she’s jealous of Julia, because of Marguerite…)

Marguerite who? Duras. Bayard notes down all the names. Does Monsieur Joyaux know a certain Michel Foucault? Sollers starts whirling around like a dervish, faster and faster, his cigarette holder still held between his lips, the incandescent end tracing graceful orange curves in the hospital corridor: “The truth, Superintendent? The whole truth … nothing but the truth … Foucault was jealous of Barthes’s fame … and especially jealous because I, Sollers, loved Barthes … because Foucault is the worst kind of tyrant, Superintendent: a lackey … Can you believe, Mr. Representative of Public Order—cough cough—that Foucault gave me an ultimatum? ‘You must choose between Barthes and me!’ … One might as easily choose between Montaigne and La Boétie … Between Racine and Shakespeare … Between Hugo and Balzac … Between Goethe and Schiller … Between Marx and Engels … Between Merckx and Poulidor … Between Mao and Lenin … Between Breton and Aragon … Between Laurel and Hardy … Between Sartre and Camus (well, no, not them) … Between de Gaulle and Tixier-Vignancour … Between the Plan and the Market … Between Rocard and Mitterrand … Between Giscard and Chirac…” Sollers slows down. He coughs into his cigarette holder. “Between Pascal and Descartes … cough cough … Between Trésor and Platini … Between Renault and Peugeot … Between Mazarin and Richelieu … Hhhhh…” But just when it looks as if he is about to collapse, he finds a second wind. “Between the Left Bank and the Right Bank … Between Paris and Beijing … Between Venice and Rome … Between Mussolini and Hitler … Between andouille and mashed potato…”

Suddenly, there is a noise in the room. Bayard opens the door and sees Barthes twitching and jerking, talking in his sleep, while the nurse tries to tuck him in. He is saying something about “starred text,” a “minor earthquake,” “blocks of signification,” the reading of which grasps only the smooth surface, imperceptibly bonded by the flow of phrases, the running speech of the narration, the naturalness of vernacular.

Bayard immediately brings in Simon Herzog to translate for him. Lying in bed, Barthes is becoming increasingly agitated. Bayard leans over him and asks: “Monsieur Barthes, did you see your attacker?” Barthes opens his madman’s eyes, grabs Bayard by the back of the neck, and declares, in an anguished, breathless voice: “The tutor signifier will be cut up into a series of short, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading. This cutting up, it must be said, will be arbitrary in the extreme; it will imply no methodological responsibility, because it will be carried out only on the signifier, while the proposed analysis will be carried out only on the signified…” Bayard shoots a quizzical look at Herzog, who shrugs. Barthes whistles threateningly between his teeth. Bayard asks him: “Monsieur Barthes, who is Sophia? What does she know?” Barthes looks at him without understanding, or perhaps understanding all too well, and starts singing in a hoarse voice: “The text is comparable in its mass to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations.” Bayard curses Herzog, whose puzzled face reveals all too clearly that he is incapable of explaining this gobbledygook, but Barthes is on the verge of hysteria when he starts shouting, as if his life depended on it: “It’s all in the text! You understand? Find the text! The function! Oh, this is so stupid!” Then he falls back on his pillow and quietly intones: “The lexia is only the wrapping of a semantic volume, the crest line of the plural text, arranged like a berm of possible meanings (but controlled, attested to by a systematic reading) under the flux of discourse: the lexia and its units will thereby form a kind of polyhedron faceted by the word, the group of words, the sentence of the paragraph, i.e., with the language which is its ‘natural’ excipient.” And he faints. Bayard tries to shake him back to consciousness. The blond nurse has to force him to put the patient down, then she clears the room again.

When Bayard asks Simon Herzog to give him the lowdown, the young professor wants to tell him that he shouldn’t take too much notice of Sollers and BHL, but at the same time he sees an opportunity, so he says with relish: “We should begin by interrogating Deleuze.”

On his way out of the hospital, Simon Herzog bumps into the blond nurse who is looking after Barthes. “Oh, excuse me, mademoiselle!” She gives him a charming smile: “No prrroblem, monsieur.”

17

Hamed wakes early. His body, still soaked with last night’s steam and drugs, jolts him from a bad sleep. Dazed and groggy, disoriented, all at sea in this unfamiliar room, it takes him a few seconds to recall how he got here and what he did. He slides out of bed, trying not to wake the man next to him, puts on his sleeveless T-shirt and his Lee Cooper jeans, goes into the kitchen to make himself coffee, finishes a joint from the night before which he finds in a Jacuzzi-shaped ashtray, grabs his jacket, a black-and-white Teddy Smith with a large red F near the heart, and leaves, slamming the door behind him.

It’s a beautiful day outside and a black DS is parked by the curb in the empty street. Hamed enjoys the fresh air while listening to Blondie on his Walkman and doesn’t notice as the black DS starts up and slowly follows him. He crosses the Seine, passes the Jardin des Plantes, thinks that with a bit of luck there’ll be someone at the Flore to buy him a real coffee. But at the Flore there are only his gigolo colleagues and two or three old guys who aren’t in the market; Sartre is already there too, coughing and smoking his pipe, surrounded by a little circle of sweater-wearing students, so Hamed asks for a cigarette from a passerby who’s walking a sad-eyed beagle, and smokes outside the Pub Saint-Germain, which is not yet open, with some other young gigolos who, like him, look as if they didn’t get enough sleep, drank too much and smoked too much, and most of whom forgot to eat the night before. There’s Saïd, who asks him if he went to the Baleine Bleue yesterday; Harold, who tells him he almost had it off with Amanda Lear at the Palace; and Slimane, who got beaten up, but can’t remember why. They all agree that they’re bored shitless. Harold would like to see Le Guignolo in Montparnasse or Odéon, but there’s no showing before 2:00 p.m. On the opposite pavement, the two guys with mustaches have parked the DS and are drinking a coffee at the Brasserie Lipp. Their suits are crumpled as if they’d slept in their car and they still have their umbrellas with them. Hamed thinks he’d be better off going home and sleeping, but he can’t be bothered to climb the six flights of stairs, so he bums another cigarette from a black guy coming out of the metro and wonders whether he should go to the hospital or not. Saïd tells him that “Babar” is in a coma, but that he might be happy to hear his voice; apparently people in comas can hear, like plants, when you play classical music to them. Harold shows them his black-and-orange reversible bomber jacket. Slimane says he saw a Russian poet they know yesterday with a scar, and that he was even more handsome like that, and this makes them giggle. Hamed decides to go to La Coupole to see if I’m there, and walks up Rue de Rennes. The two mustaches follow him, leaving their umbrellas behind, but the waiter catches up with them, yelling, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” He brandishes the umbrellas like swords, but no one pays any attention, even though it looks like it’s going to be a sunny day. The two men get their umbrellas back and start tailing their target again. They stop outside the Cosmos, which is showing Tarkovsky’s Stalker and a Soviet war film, and a little gap opens up between them and Hamed, but he keeps pausing to look in the windows of clothing stores, so there’s no danger of them losing him.

Nevertheless, one of them goes back to fetch the DS.

18

At Rue de Bizerte, between La Fourche and Place Clichy, Gilles Deleuze receives the two investigators. Simon Herzog is thrilled to meet the great philosopher, in his own home, among his books, in an apartment that smells of philosophy and stale tobacco. The TV is on, showing tennis, and Simon notices lots of books about Leibniz scattered all over the place. They hear the poc-poc of balls. It’s Connors versus Nastase.

Officially, the two men are here because Deleuze was implicated by BHL. The interrogation begins, then, with A for Accusation.

“Monsieur Deleuze, we’ve been informed of a dispute between yourself and Roland Barthes. What was it about?” Poc-poc. Deleuze lifts a half-smoked but extinct cigarette to his mouth. Bayard notices his abnormally long fingernails. “Oh, really? No, no, I didn’t have any quarrel with Roland, beyond the fact that he supported that nonentity, the moron with the white shirt.”

Simon notices the hat hanging on the hat rack. Added to the one on the coat rack in the entrance hall and the other on the dresser, that’s a lot of hats, in various colors, similar to the one Alain Delon wore in Le Samouraï.

Poc-poc.

Deleuze settles himself more comfortably in his chair: “You see that American? He’s the anti-Borg. Well, no, the anti-Borg is McEnroe: Egyptian service, Russian soul, eh? Hmm, hmm. [He coughs.] But Connors, hitting the ball full on, that constant risk-taking, those low, skimming shots … it’s very aristocratic, too. Borg: stays on the baseline, returns the ball, well above the net, thanks to his topspin. Any prole can understand that. Borg is inventing a tennis for the proletariat. McEnroe and Connors, obviously, play like princes.”

Bayard sits down on the sofa. He has a feeling he’s going to have to listen to a lot of crap.

Simon objects: “But Connors is the archetype of the people, isn’t he? He’s the bad boy, the brat, the hooligan; he cheats, he argues, he whines; he’s a bad sport, a scrapper, a fighter, he never gives up…”

Deleuze interrupts impatiently: “Oh yes? Hmm, that’s an interesting point of view.”

Bayard asks: “It’s possible that someone wanted to steal something from Monsieur Barthes. A document. Would you know anything about that, Monsieur Deleuze?”

Deleuze turns toward Simon: “It is likely that the question what? isn’t the right kind of question. It’s possible that questions like who? how much? how? where? when? would be better.”

Bayard lights a cigarette and asks in a patient, almost resigned voice: “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s obvious that if you have come to find me, more than a week after the event, to question me about a moronic philosopher’s half-baked insinuations, it’s because Roland’s accident was probably not an accident at all. So you are searching for a culprit. Or, in other words, a motive. But you are a long way from why, aren’t you? I suppose that the line of inquiry relating to the driver didn’t get you anywhere? I heard that Roland had woken up. And he didn’t want to say anything? So you change the why.”

They hear Connors grunting each time he hits the ball. Simon glances out of the window. He notices a blue Fuego parked down below.

Bayard asks why, in Deleuze’s opinion, Barthes does not want to reveal what he knows. Deleuze replies that he has no idea, but he does know one thing: “Whatever happens, whatever the situation, there are always pretenders. In other words, there are people who claim: as far as this goes, I am the best.”

Bayard grabs the owl-shaped ashtray on the coffee table and drags it toward him. “And what do you claim to be the best at, Monsieur Deleuze?”

Deleuze emits a small noise somewhere between a snigger and a cough: “One always claims to be what one cannot be or what one was once and will never be again, Superintendent. But I don’t think that is the question, is it?”

Bayard asks what the question is.

Deleuze relights his cigarette: “How to choose from among the pretenders.”

Somewhere in the building, they hear the echo of a woman screaming. They can’t tell if it’s from pleasure or anger. Deleuze points at the door: “It is a common misconception, Superintendent, that women are women by nature. Women have a devenir-femme.” He stands up, panting slightly (yes, him, too), and walks off to pour himself a glass of red wine. “We’re the same.”

Bayard, suspicious, asks: “You think we’re all the same? You think that you and me, we’re the same?”

Deleuze smiles: “Yes … well, in a way.”

Bayard, trying to show willingness but revealing a sort of reticence: “So you’re searching for the truth too?”

“Oh my! The truth … Where it begins is where it ends … We’re always in the middle of something, you know.”

Connors wins the first set 6–2.

“How can we determine which of the pretenders is the right one? If you have the how, you’ll find the why. Take the Sophists, for example: according to Plato, the problem is that they claim something they don’t have the right to claim … Oh yes, they cheat, those little shits!” He rubs his hands together. “The trial is always a trial of pretenders…”

He downs the contents of his glass in a single gulp and, looking at Simon, adds: “This is as amusing as a novel.”

Simon meets his gaze.

19

“No, it’s absolutely impossible! I categorically refuse! I won’t go! That’s enough now! There’s no way I’m setting foot in that palace! You don’t need me to decode that bastard’s words! And I don’t need to hear him; let me summarize for you: I am the groveling servant of capital. I am the enemy of the working classes. I have the media in my pocket. When I’m not hunting elephants in Africa, I hunt down independent radio stations. I muzzle freedom of expression. I build nuclear power stations all over the place. I am a populist pimp who invites himself into poor people’s homes. I receive diamonds from dictators. I like pretending to be a prole by going on the metro. I like blacks, but only when they’re emperors or garbagemen. When I hear the word humanitarian, I send in the paratroopers. I use the back rooms of extreme right-wing organizations for my private purposes. I am … I am … a STUPID FASCIST PIG!”

Simon lights a cigarette, hands trembling. Bayard waits for his tantrum to end. At this stage of the investigation, given the available evidence, he handed in a preliminary report and had a feeling that this case would turn into something big … but, even so, he didn’t expect that he would be summoned here. With his young assistant in tow.

“Anyway, I won’t go I won’t go I won’t go,” says his young sidekick.

20

“The President will receive you now.”

Jacques Bayard and Simon Herzog enter a brightly lit corner office with walls covered in green silk. Simon looks like he’s in shock, but he instinctively notes the two chairs facing the desk behind which Giscard stands and, at the other end of the room, more chairs with a sofa beside a coffee table. The student immediately grasps the possibilities: depending on whether the president wishes to maintain some distance between himself and his visitors or, alternatively, give the meeting a more convivial feel, he can welcome them from behind his desk, which acts as a sort of shield, or sit around the coffee table and eat cakes and biscuits with them. Simon Herzog also spots a book on Kennedy, placed ostentatiously on an escritoire to suggest the young, modern head of state that Giscard also aspires to embody; two boxes, one red and one blue, set on a roll-top desk; bronze statues here and there; stacks of files at a carefully calculated height: too low, they would give the impression that the president was lazy, too high, that he couldn’t cope with his workload. Several old master paintings hang on the walls. Standing behind his massive desk, Giscard points to one representing a beautiful, severe-looking woman, arms outspread, dressed in a fine white dress open to the waist that barely covers her heavy, milk-white breasts: “I was lucky enough to obtain one of the most beautiful works in the history of French painting from the Museum of Bordeaux: Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, by Eugène Delacroix. Magnificent, isn’t it? I’m sure you know Missolonghi: it’s the city where Lord Byron died, during the war of independence against the Turks. In 1824, I believe.” (Simon notes the false modesty of that “I believe.”) “A terrible war. The Ottomans were so ferocious.”

Without leaving his desk, without any attempt to shake their hands, he invites them to sit. No sofa or cakes for them. Still standing, the president goes on: “Did you know what Malraux said about me? That I had no sense of the tragic in history.” From the corner of his eye, Simon observes Bayard in his raincoat, waiting silently.

Giscard goes back over to the painting, so the two visitors feel obliged to turn around to show they are following what he says: “Perhaps I don’t have any sense of the tragic in history, but at least I feel the emotion of tragic beauty when I see that young woman, wounded in the side, bringing the hope of liberation to her people!” Unsure how to punctuate this presidential speech, the two men say nothing, which does not seem to perturb Giscard, used as he is to silent gestures of polite assent. When the man with the whistling voice turns on his heel to look out the window, Simon realizes that this pause is a form of transition, and that they are about to get to the point.

Offering his visitors only a view of the back of his bald head, the president continues: “I met Roland Barthes once. I had invited him to the Élysée. Such a charming man. He spent a quarter of an hour analyzing the menu and brilliantly deconstructed the symbolic value of each dish. It was absolutely fascinating. Poor man … I heard he found it hard to get over the death of his mother, isn’t that right?”

Finally sitting down, Giscard speaks to Bayard: “Superintendent, on the day of his accident, Monsieur Barthes was in possession of a document that was stolen from him. I wish you to recover this document. It concerns a matter of national security.”

Bayard asks: “What is the exact nature of this document, Monsieur President?”

Giscard leans forward and, with both fists resting on his desk, announces gravely: “It is a vital document that may pose a threat to national security. Used unwisely, it could cause incalculable damage and endanger the very foundations of our democracy. Unfortunately, I am not at liberty to tell you more than that. You must act in complete secrecy. But you will have carte blanche.”

He looks at Simon at last: “Young man, I’ve heard that you are acting as a … guide to the superintendent? So you are well acquainted with the linguistic milieu in which Monsieur Barthes worked?”

Simon does not need to be asked twice: “No, not really.”

Giscard shoots a quizzical look at Bayard, who explains: “Monsieur Herzog has knowledge that could be useful to the inquiry. He understands how these people think and, well, what it’s all about. And he can see things that the police wouldn’t see.”

Giscard smiles: “So you’re a visionary, like Arthur Rimbaud, young man?”

Simon mutters shyly: “No. Not at all.”

Giscard points at the red and blue boxes on the roll-top desk behind them, under the Delacroix. “What do you think is inside them?”

Simon does not realize he is being tested and, before considering whether it is in his interests to pass the test, answers instinctively: “Your Legion of Honor medals, I assume?”

Giscard’s smile widens. He stands up and walks over to the boxes, opens one, and takes out a medal: “May I ask how you guessed?”

“Well, uh … The whole room is saturated with symbols: the paintings, the wall hangings, the moldings on the ceiling … Each object, each detail is intended to express the splendor and majesty of republican power. The choice of Delacroix, the photograph of Kennedy on the cover of the book on the escritoire: everything is heavily symbolic. But a symbol has value only if it’s on display. A symbol hidden inside a box is pointless. In fact, I’d go further: it doesn’t exist.

“At the same time, I don’t suppose this room is where you keep your screwdrivers and spare bulbs. It seemed unlikely that the two boxes were for holding tools. And if they were for storing paper clips or a stapler, they’d be on your desk, where you could reach them. So the contents are neither symbolic nor functional. And yet they must be one or the other. You could put your keys in there, but I imagine that at the Élysée, the president isn’t responsible for locking up, and you don’t need your car keys either, because you have a chauffeur. So that left only one possibility: a dormant symbol, one that does not signify anything in itself here, but which would be activated outside of this room: the miniature, mobile symbol of what this place symbolizes. Namely, the grandeur of the republic. A medal, in other words. And, given where we are, it has to be the Legion of Honor.”

Giscard exchanges a knowing look with Bayard. “I think I see what you mean, Superintendent.”

21

Hamed sips his Malibu and orange as he talks a little about his life in Marseille, and his companion drinks in his words without really listening. Hamed knows what those spaniel eyes mean: he is this man’s master, because the man is overcome by the desperate desire to possess him. He’ll give himself to him later, or not, and maybe he’ll find some pleasure in it, but that pleasure will undoubtedly be less than the feeling of power he is experiencing now by knowing he is the object of desire—and this is the upside of being young, handsome, and poor: without even thinking about it he can calmly despise all those prepared to pay, in one way or another, to have him.

The evening is in full flow and, as always, in this large bourgeois apartment, in the heart of the capital, as winter comes to an end, the feeling that he does not belong here intoxicates him with a cruel joy. What we steal is worth twice as much as what we earn through hard work. He returns to the buffet to pick up more slices of bread and tapenade, which reminds him vaguely of the South, fighting his way through the mob wiggling their hips to Bashung’s “Gaby Oh Gaby.” He finds Slimane there, swallowing handfuls of escargots while forcing himself to laugh at the jokes of a paunchy publisher who is discreetly fondling his arse. Next to them, a young woman guffaws, arching her neck exaggeratedly: “So he stops … and walks backwards!” At the window, Saïd is smoking a joint with a black man who looks like a diplomat. The opening words of “One Step Beyond” come through the speakers and a frisson of fake hysteria runs through the room; people cry out as if transported by the music, as if a wave of pleasure were moving through their bodies, as if the madness were a faithful dog, supposed lost but now running toward them wagging its tail, as if they could stop thinking or not thinking for the duration of an instrumental punctuated by blasts of throaty saxophone. After this, there will be a few disco tracks to keep the good mood going. Hamed helps himself to a plate of truffle tabbouleh, seeking out the guests most likely to offer him a line of cocaine or, failing that, a bit of speed. Both make him want to fuck, but the speed softens his hard-on, although that’s not very important, he thinks. Just keep going as long as possible so he doesn’t have to go home. Hamed goes over to the window to join Saïd. A streetlamp illuminates the advertising billboard, on the corner of Boulevard Henri-IV, showing Serge Gainsbourg in a suit and tie, above the words “A Bayard changes a man. Doesn’t it, Monsieur Gainsbourg?” Hamed can’t remember why that name is familiar. And, as he’s a bit of a hypochondriac, he goes to look for a drink, reciting his previous year’s schedule to himself out loud. Slimane contemplates a series of lithographs hanging on the wall representing dogs, in every color of the rainbow, eating from bowls filled with one-dollar bills, while he pretends to ignore the paunchy publisher, who is now rubbing against his backside and breathing into the back of his neck. From the speakers, Chrissie Hynde’s voice orders any guests who may be sobbing to stop. Two long-haired guys discuss the death of Bon Scott and his possible replacement as AC/DC’s singer by a fat truck driver in a flat cap. A young man with a side parting, wearing a suit, his tie untied, repeats excitedly to anyone who will listen that he has it on good authority that you can see Marlène Jobert’s breasts in La Guerre des Polices. He’s also heard that Lennon is making a new single with McCartney. A gigolo whose name Hamed has forgotten asks him if he has any grass, mocks the party briefly as too “designer Left Bank,” and points out the window at the statue of the Spirit of Freedom atop the July Column: “You see the problem, buddy? I want us to be Jacobin as much as the next guy, but, you know, there are limits.” Someone knocks a glass of blue curaçao onto the carpet. Hamed thinks about going back to Saint-Germain, but Saïd gestures toward the bathroom, where two girls and an old man are heading in together. As the girls know they are going in there not to fuck but to sniff (something the old guy pretends not to realize because, if he can’t get what he wants, at least he’ll enjoy the prospect for five minutes), Saïd and Hamed figure that, if they play their cards right, they’ll be able to negotiate a line or maybe two. Someone asks a balding guy with a mustache if he’s Patrick Dewaere. To get rid of the paunchy publisher, Slimane grabs a blonde in stretch jeans and dances with her to “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits. The surprised publisher watches the couple whirling around while trying to look simultaneously ironic and easygoing, an expression that fools nobody. He is alone, like all of us, but he can’t hide it, and no one really notices him except to remark how lonely he looks. Slimane keeps his partner for the next dance, “Upside Down” by Diana Ross. Foucault enters the party with Hervé Guibert, just as the opening riff to the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” comes on. He’s wearing a big black leather jacket with chains and has a razor nick on his shaved head. Guibert is young and handsome, his beauty so exaggerated that only a Parisian could take him seriously as a writer. Saïd and Hamed hammer on the bathroom door and try to coax it open by lying to the people inside, coming up with ridiculous excuses, but the door remains hopelessly locked. All they hear behind it are furtive sounds of metal, enamel, and inhalation … “The sand was starting to stir under my feet…” Now as always, Foucault’s arrival provokes a sort of fearful excitement, except for the few people too out of their heads on speed to notice, who jump around to what they imagine is a song about a beach holiday: “It was the same relentless sun, the same light on the same sand…” The bathroom door finally opens and the two girls emerge, looking scornfully at Saïd and Hamed, sniffing showily, with that pride typical of a high-society cokehead who has yet to feel the loss of the liters of serotonin evaporated from her brain, although, as the months and years pass, it will take longer and longer to replace it. “He was alone…” At the center of the circle that has already formed around them, Foucault is telling young Guibert a story, as if he hadn’t noticed the turmoil his presence has aroused, continuing a conversation they’d begun on the way here: “When I was little I wanted to become a goldfish. My mother told me: ‘But you know that’s not possible, poppet. You hate cold water.’” Robert Smith’s voice yelps: “Nothing mattered!” Foucault: “That plunged me into a quandary. I said to her: ‘Please, just for one second, I’d really like to know what they think about.’” Robert Smith: “The Arab hadn’t moved!” Saïd and Hamed decide to try elsewhere, maybe at La Noche. Slimane goes back to the publisher because, well, a boy has to eat. “I was staring down at the ground…” Foucault: “Someone has to confess. There’s always one who confesses in the end…” Robert Smith: “Whether I stayed or went made no difference…” Guibert: “He was naked on the sofa, and couldn’t find a single phone booth that worked…” “I turned back toward the beach and started walking…” “And when he did finally find one, he realized he didn’t have a token…” Hamed looks outside again, through the curtains, sees a black DS parked below, and says: “I’m going to stay here a bit longer.” Saïd lights a cigarette and in the frame of the window the two figures stand out perfectly, illuminated by the party.

22

“Georges Marchais? No one cares about Georges Marchais! Surely you know that!”

Daniel Balavoine is finally able to speak. He knows that in less than three minutes they will stop him speaking, one way or another, so he tears into his maniacal monologue, stating that politicians are old, corrupt, and completely missing the point.

“I’m not talking about you, Monsieur Mitterrand…”

But still …

“What I’d like to know, what would interest me, is who the immigrant workers pay their rent to that they pay … I’d like to … Who dares every month to ask seven hundred francs a month from immigrant workers to live in Dumpsters, in slums?” It’s muddled, unstructured, full of grammatical errors, delivered way too fast, and it’s magnificent.

The journalists, who as usual understand nothing, grumble when Balavoine reproaches them for never inviting young people (and there’s the inevitable rhetorical snigger: well, obviously we do—you’re here, you little twerp!).

But Mitterrand understands exactly what is happening. This young brat is showing them up for what they are—him, the journalists around the table, and all their kind—old farts who have been moldering in one another’s company for so long that they’ve become dead to the world without even realizing it. He tries to agree wholeheartedly with the angry young man, but each attempt to get a word in edgewise ends up sounding like misjudged paternalism.

“Hang on, I’m trying to read my notes … In any case, what I want to give you is a warning…” Mitterrand fiddles with his glasses, bites his lip. This is being filmed, it’s live on television, it’s a disaster. “What I want to tell you is that despair is a motivating force and that when it’s a motivating force, it’s dangerous.”

The journalist, with a hint of sadistic irony: “Monsieur Mitterrand, you wanted to speak with a young person. You’ve listened very carefully…” Now get out of that, you jerk.

And so Mitterrand starts to stammer: “What interests me very much is that this way of thinking … of reacting … and also of communicating!—because Daniel Balavoine also expresses himself through writing and through music—should have the rights of a citizen … should be heard and, in that way, understood.” Keep digging, keep digging. “He says things his way! He is responsible for his words. He’s a citizen. Like any other.”

It is March 19, 1980, on the set of a Channel 2 news program. It is 1:30 p.m. and Mitterrand is a thousand years old.

23

What does Barthes think about as he dies? About his mother, they say. His mother killed him. Of course, of course, there’s always the hidden personal business, the dirty little secret. As Deleuze says, we all have a grandmother who had amazing experiences … so what? “About his grief.” Yes, sir, he is going to die of heartbreak and nothing else. Poor little French thinkers, trapped in your vision of a world reduced to the pettiest, most formulaic, most flatly egocentric domestic concerns. A world without enigma, without mystery. The mother—mother of all responses. In the twentieth century, we got rid of God, and put the mother in His place. What a great trade. But Barthes is not thinking about his mother.

If you could follow the thread of his hazy reverie, you would know that the dying man thinks about what he was, but above all about what he could have been. What else? He doesn’t see his whole life in a flash, just the accident. Who ran the operation? He remembers that he was manhandled. And then the document disappeared. Whoever’s responsible, we are probably on the brink of an unprecedented catastrophe. Whereas he, Roland, his mother’s son, would have known how to make good use of it: a little for him, the rest for the world. His shyness defeated him in the end. What a waste. Even if he survives, it will be too late to celebrate.

Roland does not think about his mommy. This is not Psycho.

What does he think about? Maybe he sees this or that memory flash through his mind, things that are private or insignificant or known only to him. One evening—or was it still daylight?—he was sharing a taxi with his American translator, who was over in Paris for a brief stay, and Foucault. The three of them are sitting in the backseat, the translator in the middle, and Foucault, as usual, is monopolizing the conversation. He speaks in his animated, confident, nasal voice, like a voice from days of old, and he is the one in control, as ever. He improvises a little speech to explain how much he hates Picasso, how crappy Picasso really is, and he laughs, of course, and the young translator listens politely; in his own country he is a writer and a poet, but here, he listens deferentially to these two brilliant French intellectuals’ speeches, and Barthes already knows that he’s powerless to match Foucault’s loquacity, but he has to say something all the same if he doesn’t want to be left out, so he wins some time by laughing, too, but he knows that his laughter doesn’t ring true, and he’s embarrassed because he seems embarrassed, it’s a vicious circle. It’s been like this all his life. He wishes he could have Foucault’s self-assurance. Even when he speaks to his students and they listen reverently, he shelters his shyness behind a professorial tone, but it is only when he writes that he feels sure of himself, that he is sure of himself, alone, in the refuge of his page, and all his books, his Proust, his Chateaubriand, and Foucault continues to babble on and on about Picasso, and so Barthes, in order not to be left out, says that he, too, hates Picasso, and when he says this he hates himself, because he can see exactly what’s happening, it’s his job to see what’s happening: he’s debasing himself in front of Foucault, and no doubt the young and handsome translator realizes it too. He spits on Picasso but only timidly, a small gob of spit, while Foucault roars with laughter, he agrees that Picasso is overrated, that he has never understood what people saw in him, and I can’t be certain that he didn’t think this; after all, Barthes was above all a classicist who, deep down, did not like modern life, but really—what does it matter? Even if he did hate Picasso, he knows that’s not the point; the point is not to be outdone by Foucault; the point is that as soon as Foucault makes such a provocative statement, he would look like an old fart if he disagreed, so even if he genuinely didn’t like Picasso, he now denigrates him and mocks him, in this taxi taking him God knows where, for the wrong reasons.

Perhaps that is how Barthes dies, thinking about that taxi ride, that is how he closes his eyes and falls asleep, sadly, with that sadness that has always filled him, never mind his mother, and perhaps he spares a brief thought for Hamed, too. What will become of him? And of the secret he now guards? He sinks slowly, gently into his final sleep and, well, it’s not an unpleasant sensation, but while his bodily functions give out one by one, his mind continues to wander. Where else will this final reverie lead him?

Hey, he should have said that he didn’t like Racine! “The French boast endlessly about having had their Racine (the man who used only two thousand words) and never complain about not having had their Shakespeare.” There—that would have impressed the young translator. But Barthes wrote that much later. Ah, if only he’d had the function then …

The door opens slowly, but Barthes is in his coma and does not hear it.

It’s not true that he’s a “classicist”: deep down, he doesn’t like the seventeenth century’s dryness, those heavily layered alexandrines, those finely chiseled aphorisms, those intellectualized passions …

He does not hear the footsteps approaching his bed.

Of course, they were peerless rhetoricians, but he doesn’t like their coldness, their fleshlessness. The Racinian passions? Pfft, big deal. Phaedra, sure … well, the confession scene in the pluperfect subjunctive, tantamount to the conditional past … all right, sure, that was brilliant. Phaedra rewriting the story with her in Ariadne’s place and Hippolytus in the place of Theseus …

He doesn’t know that someone is leaning over his electrocardiogram.

But Berenice? Titus didn’t love her anymore, that was blatantly obvious. It’s so simple, you’d think it was Corneille …

He does not see the figure rummaging in his belongings.

And La Bruyère, so scholarly. At least Pascal conversed with Montaigne, Racine with Voltaire, La Fontaine with Valéry … But who would want to have a conversation with La Bruyère?

He does not feel the hand delicately turning the valve of the ventilator.

But La Rochefoucauld … him, yes. After all, Barthes owes a great deal to Maximes. He was a semiologist before his time, in that he knew how to decode the human soul through the signs of our behavior … The greatest master in French literature, no less … Barthes sees the Prince of Marcillac riding proudly beside the Grand Condé in the ditches of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under fire from Turenne’s troops, thinking, my word, what a beautiful day for dying …

What’s happening? He can’t breathe anymore. His throat has suddenly shrunk.

But the Grande Mademoiselle will open the city gates to let the Condé’s troops in, and La Rochefoucauld, wounded in the eyes, temporarily blind, will not die, not this time, and will recover …

He opens his eyes. And he sees her, haloed by blinding light, like a representation of the Virgin Mary. He is suffocating. He tries to call for help, but no sound emerges from his mouth.

He’ll recover, won’t he? Won’t he?

She smiles sweetly at him and presses his head against the pillow to prevent him from sitting up. Not that he has enough strength, anyway. This time it’s for good, he knows it. He would like to surrender but his body goes into convulsions. His body wants to live. His frightened brain craves the oxygen that is no longer entering his bloodstream. Spurred by a final burst of adrenaline, his heart races, then slows down again.

“Always to love, to suffer, to expire.” In the end, his final thought is a line of verse from Corneille.

24

The television news, March 26, 1980, 8:00 p.m., presented by Patrick Poivre d’Arvor:

“Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. A great deal of news that … [PPDA pauses for a second] affects our day-to-day lives. So, some of it is good, some less so. I’ll let you decide which is which.” (From his apartment, next to Place Clichy, Deleuze, who never misses the evening news, replies from the comfort of his armchair: “Thank you!”)

8:01 p.m.: “First of all, the rise in the cost of living for the month of February: 1.1 percent. ‘It’s not a very good sign,’ said René Monory, the minister for the economy—although it is better [it would have been difficult to be worse, says PPDA, and, in front of his TV set, on Rue de Bièvre, Mitterrand thinks the same thing] than the figure for January: 1.9 percent. Also better than the corresponding figures for the United States and Great Britain and … the same as West Germany’s.” (At the mention of their German rivals, Giscard, who is signing documents at his desk in the Élysée, chuckles mechanically without looking up. In his attic room, Hamed is getting ready to go out, but can’t find his second sock.)

8:09 p.m.: “There are strikes, too, in schools. Tomorrow, the teachers’ union is calling on its members in Paris and the Essonne to protest against planned class closures for the next academic year.” (Holding a Chinese beer in one hand, his cigarette holder in the other, Sollers curses from his sofa: “A nation of bureaucrats!” From the kitchen, Kristeva replies: “I’m making sauté de veau.”)

8:10 p.m.: “Finally, some news that will come as a ‘breath of fresh air,’ so to speak [Simon rolls his eyes]: the significant reduction in atmospheric pollution in France over the last seven years. Sulfur emissions down thirty percent, according to Michel d’Ornano, the environment minister, and carbon dioxide down forty-six percent.” (Mitterrand tries to put on a grimace of disgust, but in fact this doesn’t alter his usual expression.)

8:11 p.m.: “So, foreign news … Today, in Chad … Afghanistan … Colombia…” (Various countries are mentioned but no one listens, except Foucault. Hamed finds his sock.)

8:12 p.m.: “A rather surprising victory for Edward Kennedy in the New York State primaries…” (Deleuze picks up his telephone to call Félix Guattari. At home, Bayard irons his shirt in front of the television.)

8:13 p.m.: “The number of road accidents rose last year, the Gendarmerie Nationale informs us: 12,480 deaths and 250,000 accidents in 1979 … that’s equal to the entire population of a town like Salon-de-Provence dying in these accidents. [Hamed wonders why the newsreader chose Salon-de-Provence.] Figures that give us food for thought, with the Easter holidays approaching…” (Sollers lifts a finger and exclaims: “Food for thought! Food for thought, Julia, do you hear?… Isn’t that marvelous?… Figures that give us food for thought, ha!” Kristeva replies: “Dinner’s ready!”)

8:15 p.m.: “A road accident that could have had very serious consequences: yesterday, a truck transporting radioactive materials collided with another truck before crashing into a ditch. But thanks to the safety systems, there has not been a radioactive leak.” (Mitterrand, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, Simon, Lacan, all laugh loudly in front of their respective TV sets. Bayard lights a cigarette while continuing to iron shirts.)

8:23 p.m.: “And the interview with François Mitterrand in La Croix, with these little phrases that will go down in history [Mitterrand smiles with pleasure]: ‘Giscard remains the man bound to a clan, a class, and a caste. Six years of stagnation, belly-dancing in front of the Golden Calf. And pshit, said Ubu.’” (“That is François Mitterrand saying that,” PPDA makes clear. Giscard rolls his eyes.) “So that is what he said about the president. About Georges Marchais and his gang of three, well … ‘When he wants to be,’ says François Mitterrand again, ‘Marchais is a world-class comic.’ [In his apartment on Rue d’Ulm, Althusser shrugs. He shouts to his wife, in the kitchen: “Did you hear that, Hélène?” No response.] Finally, François Mitterrand, in response to a question about a possible Mitterrand-Rocard ticket for the Socialist Party, he pimply … [PPDA gets his words muddled, but continues impassively] simply replied that this American expression had no French equivalent in our institutions.”

8:24 p.m.: “Roland Barthes … [PPDA pauses] died this afternoon in the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris. [Giscard stops signing documents, Mitterrand stops grimacing, Sollers stops rummaging around in his underpants with his cigarette holder, Kristeva stops stirring her sautéed veal and runs out of the kitchen, Hamed stops putting on his sock, Althusser stops trying to not yell at his wife, Bayard stops ironing his shirts, Deleuze says to Guattari: “I’ll call you back!,” Foucault stops thinking about biopower, Lacan continues smoking his cigar.] The writer and philosopher was the victim of a traffic accident last month. He was [PPDA pauses] sixty-four years old. He was famous for his work on modern writing and communication. Bernard Pivot interviewed him for Apostrophes: Roland Barthes was presenting his book A Lover’s Discourse, a book that was extremely successful [Foucault rolls his eyes], and in the clip we are going to see now, he explained from a sociological point of view [Simon rolls his eyes] the relationships between sentimentality … [PPDA pauses] and sexuality. [Foucault rolls his eyes.] We’ll listen to that now.” (Lacan rolls his eyes.)

Roland Barthes (in his Philippe Noiret voice): “I maintain that a subject—and I say a subject in order not to specify the, er, sex of the subject, if you see what I mean—but a subject who is in love would have, uh, a lot more difficulty over … overcoming the sort of taboo about sentimentality, whereas the taboo about sexuality is, today, transgressed very easily.”

Bernard Pivot: “Because to be in love is to be childish, silly?” (Deleuze rolls his eyes. Mitterrand thinks he should call his daughter, Mazarine.)

Roland Barthes: “Uh … yes, in a way, that’s what the world does believe. The world attributes two qualities, or rather two faults, to the subject who is in love: the first is that they are often stupid—there is a silliness to being in love that the subject feels—and there is also the madness of people in love—and this is a very popular observation these days!—except that it is a polite madness, isn’t it, a madness lacking the glory of a great, transgressive madness.” (Foucault lowers his eyes and smiles.)

The clip ends. PPDA says: “So, we’ve seen, er, Jean-François Kahn, er, Roland Barthes was fascinated by everything, he talked about everything, er, we saw him, er, in films … playing roles … recently, er, but would you describe him as a Renaissance man?” (It’s true: he played Thackeray in Téchiné’s Brontë Sisters, a small role that he did not besmirch with his talent, Simon remembers.)

J.-F. Kahn (very excited): “Well, yes, apparently he is a Renaissance man! Yes, he dealt with, er, er, he wrote about fashion, about ties, or I don’t know what, he wrote about wrestling!… He wrote about Racine, about Michelet, about photography, about cinema, he wrote about Japan, so, yes, he was a Renaissance man! [Sollers chuckles. Kristeva glares at him.] But in fact, it does all fit together. Take his last book! On lovers’ discourses … on the language of love … well, in truth, Roland Barthes always wrote about language! But he found that … his tie … our tie … is a way of speaking. [Sollers, indignantly: “A way of speaking … Oh, come on!”] It’s a way of expressing oneself, fashion. The motorbike: it’s the way a society expressed itself. The cinema: obviously! Photography, too. So that’s to say that Roland Barthes is, at heart, a man who spent his time tracking signs!… The signs a society, a community, uses to express itself. Expresses vague, confused feelings, even if it’s not aware of it! In this sense, he was a very great journalist. He was the master of a science called semiology. That is, the science of signs.

“And then, of course, he was a very great literary critic! Because, the same thing applies: What is a literary work? A literary work is what a writer writes to express himself. And what Roland Barthes showed is that, essentially, in a literary work, there are three levels: there is the language—Racine wrote in French, Shakespeare wrote in English, that’s the language. There is the style: this is the result of their technique, their talent. But between the style—which is a choice, you know, it’s controlled by the author—and the language, there is a third level, which is the writing. And the writing, he said, is the place … of politics, in every sense of the word. In other words, even if the writer is not aware of it the writing is the thing through which he expresses what he is socially, his culture, his origins, his social class, the society around him … and even if he sometimes writes something because it seems self-evident—I don’t know, in a Racine play, say: ‘Let us retire to our rooms’ or something that seems self-evident—ah, but it’s not! It’s not self-evident, says Barthes. Even if he says it’s self-evident, don’t believe it, because there’s something being expressed beneath it.”

PPDA (who has not been listening, or has not understood, or simply doesn’t care), earnestly: “Because every word is dissected!”

J.-F. Kahn (who doesn’t notice): “So, so, as well as that … what’s great with Barthes is that this is a man who has written things that are very … mathematical, very cold in style, and who, at the same time, has produced veritable hymns to the beauty of style. But to conclude, let’s say that he is a very important man. Who I think expresses the spirit of our age. And I’m going to tell you why. Because there are ages that are expressed through the theater, you know, really. [Here, Kahn makes an untranslatable gurgling sound.] Others through the novel: the 1950s, for example, Mauriac, er, Camus, er, et cetera. But I think the 1960s … in France … France’s cultural spirit is expressed through the discourse on the discourse. On the marginal discourse. We’re probably aware that we haven’t produced any truly great novels … maybe not, or great plays; the best thing we have produced is a way of explaining what others have said or have done and, by better explaining what they’ve done or said or other things, revitalizing an ancient discourse.”

PPDA: “In a few moments, soccer. At the Parc des Princes, France will play the Netherlands [Hamed leaves his apartment, slamming the door and hurtling down the stairs]: a friendly match that is much more important than you might think [Simon turns off his television], because the Dutch were the losing finalists, as we know, in the last two World Cups [Foucault turns off his television], and also, crucially, because France and the Netherlands are in the same qualifying group for the next World Cup, in 1982, in Spain. [Giscard starts signing documents again. Mitterrand picks up his phone to call Jack Lang.] You can watch a recording of that match after tonight’s late news, which will be presented by Hervé Claude, at around ten fifty p.m.” (Sollers and Kristeva sit down to eat. Kristeva pretends to wipe away a tear and says: “Rrreal life goes on.” In two hours, Bayard and Deleuze will both watch the match.)

25

It is Thursday, March 27, 1980, and Simon Herzog is reading the newspaper in a bar full of young people sitting at tables with cups of coffee they finished hours ago. I would situate the café on Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, but, again, you can put him wherever you like, it doesn’t really matter. It’s probably more practical and logical to put him in the Latin Quarter, though, to explain all the young people. There’s a pool table, and the sound of the balls colliding clicks like a pulse beneath the hubbub of late-afternoon conversations. Simon Herzog is also drinking coffee, because it still seems a bit early—given the expectations of his social class and individual personality—to order a beer.

The main headlines on the front page of Le Monde dated Friday, March 28, 1980 (it is always already tomorrow with Le Monde), concern Thatcher’s “anti-inflationary” budget (setting out—surprise, surprise—a “reduction in public spending”) and the civil war in Chad, but in the bottom of the right-hand column there is also a small mention of Barthes’s death. The famous journalist Bertrand Poirot-Delpech’s obituary begins with these words: “Just twenty years after Camus breathed his last in a glove box, literature has paid the chrome goddess a rather harsh price!” Simon rereads the phrase several times, and glances around the room.

Around the pool table, two boys of about twenty are facing off, watched by a girl who looks barely legal. Simon automatically identifies what’s going on: the more smartly dressed boy desires the girl, who desires the more disheveled-looking boy, with his long hair and slightly grubby appearance, whose faintly arrogant detachment makes it difficult to tell whether he is interested in the girl—and is simulating a tactical indifference as a mark of his superiority, a statutory indifference linked to his condition as the dominant male who takes it for granted that the girl will be his by right—or if he is waiting for another girl, more beautiful, more rebellious, less shy, more suited to someone of his standing (the two hypotheses obviously not being incompatible).

Poirot-Delpech goes on: “If Barthes, along with Bachelard, is one of those who have done most to enrich criticism during the last thirty years, it is not as a theoretician of a still-hazy semiology but as the champion of a new pleasure in reading.” The semiologist in Simon Herzog emits a grunt. Pleasure in reading, blah blah blah. Still-hazy semiology, my arse. Even if, well … “More than a new Saussure, he would have been a new Gide.” Simon slams his cup into its saucer and the coffee spills over onto his newspaper. The noise is drowned out by the sound of the pool balls, so no one notices, except for the girl, who turns around. Simon meets her eye.

The two boys are both obviously bad pool players, but this does not prevent them from using the table as a sort of stage, frowning, nodding, bending to bring their chins close to the balls, phases of intense thinking leading to innumerable circuits of the table, technical and tactical calculations regarding the white ball’s point of impact on the colored ball (itself chosen according to changeable criteria), repetition of practice shots with hard, jerky, too-fast movements evoking both the game’s erotic stakes and the players’ inexperience, followed by a shot whose speed cannot mask its clumsiness. Simon turns back to Le Monde.

Jean-Philippe Lecat, the minister of culture and communication, declared: “All his work on writing and thought was motivated by the deep study of mankind in order to help us know ourselves better and to live better in society.” Another, better-controlled slamming of the cup into the saucer. Simon checks to see if the girl turns around (she does). Apparently no one at the Ministry of Culture could be bothered to come up with anything better than this platitude. Simon wonders if it is based on some sort of formula that, with minor variations, can be applied to any writer, philosopher, historian, sociologist, biologist … The in-depth study of mankind? Oh yes, bravo, my good sir, what a sterling effort! And you can trot it out again for Sartre, Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Bourdieu.

Simon hears the smartly dressed boy contesting a rule: “No, you don’t get two penalty shots if you pot a ball with your first shot.” Sophomore law student (though he probably had to repeat his first year). Analyzing his clothes, jacket, shirt, Simon would plump for Panthéon-Assas University. Emphasizing each word, the other boy replies: “Okay, no problem, cool, whatever you want. I don’t care. It’s all the same to me, man.” Sophomore psychology (or repeating his first year) at Censier or Jussieu (he’s on home turf, clearly). The girl gives a faux-discreet smile that is intended to be knowing. She has two-tone Kickers, electric-blue turn-up jeans, a ponytail held in place by a scrunchie, and she smokes Dunhill Lights: modern literature, first year, Sorbonne or Sorbonne Nouvelle, probably having skipped a year of school.

“For an entire generation, he blazed a trail in the analysis of communication media, mythologies, and languages. Roland Barthes’s work will remain in everyone’s heart like a vibrant call to liberty and happiness.” So Mitterrand is not very inspired either, but at least he gestures toward Barthes’s fields of expertise.

After an interminable endgame, Assas wins haphazardly with an improbable shot (potting the black in off the cushion, following the imaginary rule invented by Breton drunkards to prolong the pleasure) and lifts his arms in imitation of Borg. Censier tries to compose himself with a mocking expression, Sorbonne goes over to Censier and consoles him by rubbing his arm, and all three pretend to laugh, as if it were merely a game.

The Communist Party also made a statement: “It is to the intellectual who devoted the lion’s share of his work to a new way of thinking about imagination and communication, the pleasure of the text, and the materiality of writing, that we pay tribute today.” Simon isolates the most important element of this sentence immediately: “It is to” that intellectual that we pay tribute, not, the implication being, to the other one: the neutral, uncommitted man who ate lunch with Giscard and went to China with his Maoist friends.

Another girl enters the bar: long curly hair, leather jacket, Dr. Martens, earrings, ripped jeans. Simon thinks: history of art, first year. She kisses the disheveled young man on the mouth. Simon observes the ponytailed girl carefully. On her face he reads bitterness, suppressed anger, the irresistible feeling of inferiority that rises in her (unfounded, obviously) and manifests itself in the folds of her mouth, the unmistakable traces of the battle within between resentment and contempt. Once again, their eyes meet. The girl’s eyes blaze for a second with an indefinable brilliance. She gets up, walks over to him, leans across the table, stares straight into his eyes, and says: “What’s your problem, dickhead? You want my photo or what?” Embarrassed, Simon stammers something incomprehensible and starts reading an article on Michel Rocard.

26

The pretty village of Urt had never seen so many Parisians. They have taken the train to Bayonne. They have come for the funeral. An icy wind blows through the cemetery, the rain hammers down, and the mourners gather in small groups, none having thought to bring an umbrella. Bayard has made the trip too, and brought Simon Herzog with him, and the two of them observe the soaked fauna of Saint-Germain. We are 485 miles from the Café de Flore, and to see Sollers nervously chewing his cigarette holder or BHL buttoning his shirt, you feel that the ceremony had better not go on too long. Simon Herzog and Jacques Bayard are able to identify almost everyone: there’s the Sollers/Kristeva/BHL group; the Youssef/Paul/Jean-Louis group; Foucault’s group, containing Daniel Defert, Mathieu Lindon, Hervé Guibert, and Didier Eribon; the university group (Todorov, Genette); the Vincennes group (Deleuze, Cixous, Althusser, Châtelet); Barthes’s brother, Michel, and his wife, Rachel; his editor, Eric Marty, and two students and former lovers, Antoine Compagnon and Renaud Camus, as well as a group of gigolos (Hamed, Saïd, Harold, Slimane); film people (Téchiné, Adjani, Marie-France Pisier, Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory); two male twins dressed like astronauts in mourning (neighbors who work in television, apparently), and some villagers …

Everyone in Urt liked him. At the cemetery gate, two men get out of a black DS and open an umbrella. Someone in the crowd spots the car and exclaims: “Look, a DS!” A delighted murmur runs through the gathering, who see in it an homage to Barthes’s Mythologies, published with the famous Citroën on the front cover. Simon whispers to Bayard: “Do you think the murderer is in the crowd?” Bayard does not reply. He looks at every mourner and thinks they all look guilty. To get anywhere in this investigation, he knows that he has to understand what he’s searching for. What did Barthes possess of such value that someone not only stole it from him but they wanted to kill him for it too?

27

We are in Fabius’s magnificent apartment in the Panthéon, which as I imagine it has moldings all over the place and herringbone parquet flooring. A group of Socialist Party advisers have met to discuss their candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, in terms of image and—at the time, the term is still a little vulgar—“communication.”

The first column is almost empty. The only thing written there is Denied de Gaulle a first-round victory. And Fabius remarks that this achievement dates back fifteen years.

The second column is much fuller. In ascending order of importance:

Madagascar

Observatoire

Algerian War

Too old (too Fourth Republic)

Canines too long (looks cynical)

Loses all the time

Bizarrely, back then, his Francisque medal, received directly from General Pétain, and his functions in the Vichy regime, however modest, are never mentioned, neither by the media (amnesiac, as usual) nor by his political enemies (who perhaps don’t want to upset their own constituency with unpleasant memories). Only the very small group on the extreme right are spreading what the new generation considers a calumny.

The meeting begins. Fabius has served hot drinks, cookies, and fruit juice on a large varnished wooden table. To indicate the size of their task, Moati takes out an old editorial on Mitterrand by Jean Daniel, which he cut out of a Nouvel Obs from 1966: “Not only does this man give the impression that he believes in nothing: when you are with him, he makes you feel guilty for believing in something. Almost involuntarily, he insinuates that nothing is pure, all is sordid, and that no illusions are allowed.”

All the men gathered around the table agree that they have a job on their hands.

Moati eats Palmitos.

Badinter pleads Mitterrand’s cause: in politics, cynicism is only a relative handicap; it can also suggest shrewdness and pragmatism. After all, compromise doesn’t have to be unprincipled. The very nature of democracy necessitates flexibility and calculation. Diogenes the Cynic was a particularly enlightened philosopher.

“Okay. So what about the Observatoire?” asks Fabius.

Lang protests: this murky affair about a faked attack was never cleared up, and it was all based on the dubious testimony of an ex-Gaullist turned right-wing extremist who changed his story several times. And Mitterrand’s car had been found riddled with bullets! Lang seems genuinely indignant.

“Agreed,” says Fabius. So that’s his shady past dealt with. But there remains the fact that, up to now, he has not come across as especially likable or especially socialist.

Jack Lang reminds them that Jean Cau said Mitterrand was a priest and his socialism was “the flip side of his Christianity.”

Debray sighs. “What a load of crap.”

Badinter lights a cigarette.

Moati eats Chokinis.

Attali: “He decided to move to the left. He thinks it’s necessary to contain the Communist Party. But it puts off moderate left-wing voters.”

Debray: “No, what you call a moderate left-wing voter, I would call a centrist. Or a radical Valoisian, at a push. Those people will vote for the Right, no matter what. They’re Giscardians.”

Fabius: “Including left-wing radicals?”

Debray: “Naturally.”

Lang: “All right, and the canines?”

Moati: “We’ve booked him an appointment with a dentist in the Marais. He’s going to give him a smile like Paul Newman’s.”

Fabius: “Age?”

Attali: “Experience.”

Debray: “Madagascar?”

Fabius: “Who cares? Everyone’s forgotten it.”

Attali: “He was minister of the colonies in ’51, and the massacres took place in ’47. Sure, he said some unfortunate things, but he doesn’t have blood on his hands.”

Badinter says nothing. Neither does Debray. Moati drinks his hot chocolate.

Lang: “But there’s that film where you see him in a colonial helmet in front of Africans in loincloths…”

Moati: “The TV stations won’t show those images again.”

Fabius: “Colonialism is a bad subject for the Right. They won’t want to get into this.”

Attali: “That’s true for the Algerian War too. First and foremost, Algeria is de Gaulle’s betrayal. It’s sensitive. Giscard won’t take any risks with the pied-noir vote.”

Debray: “And the Communists?”

Fabius: “If Marchais plays the Algerian card, we’ll play Messerschmitt. In politics, as in every other aspect of life, it’s not in anyone’s interests to dig up the past.”

Attali: “And if he insists, we’ll hit him with the Nazi-Soviet Pact!”

Fabius: “Okay, fine. And the positives?”

Silence.

They pour themselves more coffee.

Fabius lights a cigarette.

Jack Lang: “Well, his image is of a man of letters.”

Attali: “Who cares? The French vote for Badinguet, not for Victor Hugo.”

Lang: “He’s a great orator.”

Debray: “Yeah.”

Moati: “No.”

Fabius: “Robert?”

Badinter: “Yes and no.”

Debray: “He’s a crowd-pleaser.”

Badinter: “He’s good when he has the time to develop his line of thought, and when he’s feeling confident.”

Moati: “But he’s no good on TV.”

Lang: “He’s good when he goes head-to-head.”

Attali: “But not face-to-face.”

Badinter: “He’s uncomfortable when anyone resists or contradicts him. He knows how to construct an argument, but he doesn’t like being interrupted. As powerful as he can be at a rally, with the crowd behind him, he can be equally abstruse and boring with journalists.”

Fabius: “That’s because on TV he usually despises whoever’s interviewing him.”

Lang: “He likes to take his time, to warm up slowly. Onstage, he can do that, feel his way forward, test out his rhetoric, adapt to his audience. On TV, that’s impossible.”

Moati: “But TV’s not going to change for him.”

Attali: “Well, not in the next year anyway. Once we’re in power…”

All: “… we fire Elkabbach!” (laughter)

Lang: “He has to think about TV like a giant rally. He has to tell himself that the crowd is right behind the camera.”

Moati: “He needs to watch out for waxing lyrical, though. It’s okay at a rally, but it doesn’t work in a studio.”

Attali: “He has to learn to be more concise and direct.”

Moati: “He has to improve. He has to train for it. We’ll make him rehearse.”

Fabius: “Hmm, he’s going to love that.”

28

After four or five days, Hamed finally decides to go home, at least to check whether he might have a clean T-shirt lying around somewhere, so he drags himself up the six or seven flights of stairs that lead to his attic room, where he can’t take a shower because there’s no bathroom but he can at least collapse on his bed for a few hours to purge himself of physical and nervous fatigue and the vanity of the world and existence. But when he turns the key in the lock, he feels something odd and notices that the door has been forced, so he gently pushes it open—it creaks discreetly—and finds his room in a state of chaos: the bed turned over, the drawers pulled out, the baseboard torn off, his clothes spread all over the floor, his fridge open with a bottle of Banga left intact in the door, the mirror over the sink broken into several pieces, his cans of Gini and 7 Up scattered to the far corners of the room, his collection of Yacht Magazine torn out page by page as well as his comic-book history of France (the volume on the French Revolution and the one on Napoleon seem to have disappeared), his dictionary and his books thrown haphazardly around, the tape from his music cassettes unraveled and his stereo partially dismantled.

Hamed respools a Supertramp tape, puts it in the cassette player, and presses PLAY to see if it still works. Then he collapses onto his upside-down mattress and falls asleep, fully clothed, door wide open, to the opening chords of “The Logical Song,” thinking that when he was young he, too, thought that life was a miracle, beautiful and magical, but that, while things have certainly changed, he doesn’t yet feel very responsible nor very radical.

29

A line thirty feet long has formed outside the Gratte-Ciel, which is guarded by a bulky, severe-looking black bouncer. Hamed spots Saïd and Slimane with a tall, wiry lad known as “the Sergeant.” Together, they skip the line, greeting the bouncer by name and telling him that Roland, no, Michel, is waiting for them inside. The doors of the Gratte-Ciel open for them. Inside, they are assailed by a strange smell, like a mix of curry, cinnamon, vanilla, and fishing port. They meet Jean-Paul Goude, who leaves his belt in the cloakroom, and they can tell instantly that he is wasted. Saïd leans toward Hamed to tell him, no, the Giscard years must come to an end, the cost of living is too high, but he has to get some dope. Slimane sees the young Bono Vox at the bar. On the stage, a gothic reggae group is playing a vulgar, ethereal set. The Sergeant is nonchalantly wiggling his hips to the drum machine, behind the beat, watched by the curious, miserable-looking Bono. Yves Mourousi talks to Grace Jones’s stomach. Brazilian dancers slalom between the customers, executing the fluid movements of capoeira. A former minister of some standing under the Fourth Republic tries to touch the breasts of a young, almost famous actress. And there is always that procession of boys and girls wearing live lobsters on their heads or walking them on leashes, the lobster being, for reasons unknown, the fashionable animal in Paris, 1980.

At the entrance, two badly dressed men with mustaches slip the bouncer a five-franc note and he lets them in. They leave their umbrellas in the cloakroom.

Saïd asks Hamed about drugs. Hamed gestures to relax and rolls a joint on a coffee table shaped like a naked woman on all fours, like the one in the Moloko Bar in A Clockwork Orange. Next to Hamed, on a corner sofa, Alice Sapritch takes a drag through her cigarette holder, an imperial smile on her lips, a boa around her neck (a real boa, thinks Hamed, but he also thinks it is a stupid affectation). She leans toward them and yells: “So, my darlings, is this a good night?” Hamed smiles as he lights his joint, but Saïd replies: “For what?”

At the bar, the Sergeant has managed to get Bono to buy him a drink, and Slimane wonders what language the two of them are speaking. In fact, though, they do not appear to be talking to each other. The two mustachioed guys have gone to a corner of the room and ordered a bottle of Polish vodka, the one with bison grass in it, which has the effect of attracting a group of young people of various sexes to their table, with one or two B-list stars in their wake. Near the bar, Victor Pecci (dark-haired, shirt open, diamond earring) is chatting with Vitas Gerulaitis (blond, shirt open, clip earring). Slimane waves to a young anorexic girl who is talking to the singer of Taxi Girl. Just next to him, leaning against a concrete pillar designed to look like a square Doric column, Téléphone’s bassist doesn’t bat an eyelid as a girl licks his cheek, trying to explain to him how people drink tequilas in Orlando. The Sergeant and Bono have disappeared. Slimane is buttonholed by Yves Mourousi. Foucault emerges from the toilets and begins a heated conversation with one of the singers from ABBA. Saïd shouts at Hamed: “I want some drugs, dope, blow, crack, smack, speed, poppers, whatever, but get me something, for fuck’s sake!” Hamed hands him the joint, which he grabs angrily, as if to say “This is what I think of your joint” and puts it to his mouth, sucking greedily, disgustedly on it. In their corner, the two mustaches are hitting it off with their new friends, clinking glasses and exclaiming “Na zdravie!” Jane Birkin is trying to say something to a young man who looks like he could be her brother, but the man makes her repeat it five times before shrugging helplessly. Saïd yells at Hamed: “What’s left? The PAC? Is that the plan?” Hamed realizes Saïd will be unbearable until he’s had his fix, so he grabs him by the shoulders and says, “Listen,” staring into his eyes as he would with someone in a state of shock or smashed out of their mind, and he takes a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket. It’s an invitation for the Adamantium, a club that has just opened opposite the Rex, where a dealer he knows ought to be this evening, supplying the atmosphere for what the flyer calls, above a large drawing of a face that vaguely resembles Lou Reed, a special ’70s night. He asks Alice Sapritch for a pen and carefully writes the name of the dealer on the back of the flyer in block capitals, which he hands solemnly to Saïd, who slides it tenderly into his inside jacket pocket and takes off immediately. In their corner, the two badly dressed men with mustaches look like they’re having a great time; they have invented a new pastis-vodka-Suze cocktail, and Inès de La Fressange has joined them at their table, but when they see Saïd heading toward the exit, they suddenly stop laughing, politely brush aside the attentions of the drummer from Trust, who wants to kiss them while yelling “Brat! Brat!,” and stand up together.

On the Grands Boulevards, Saïd walks determinedly, blind to the two men who are following him at a distance, armed with their umbrellas. He calculates the number of tricks he’ll have to perform in the Adamantium’s toilets in order to pay for his gram of cocaine. Maybe he’ll have to take amphetamines: they’re not as good, but not as expensive either. Though they last longer. But anyway. Five minutes to pull a client, five minutes to locate an empty cubicle, five minutes for the trick, so a quarter of an hour altogether, three tricks should be enough, maybe two if he finds a couple of really horny rich guys—and surely the Adamantium wants to attract VIPs? It doesn’t look like a cheap lesbian junkie kind of place. All being well, he’ll have the drugs in an hour. But the two men have drawn closer, and just as he is about to cross Boulevard Poissonnière, the first one points his umbrella down and stabs him in the leg through his stonewashed jeans while the second—as Saïd cries out, startled by the sudden pain—reaches inside his jacket and purloins the flyer from the pocket. By the time he has turned around, the two men have already run to the other side of the pedestrian crossing, and Saïd feels his leg throbbing. He also felt the furtive touch of the man’s hand on his chest, so he thinks the two men must have been pickpockets, and he checks that he still has his papers (he has no money), but his head starts to spin when he realizes they’ve stolen his invitation, and he runs after them, shouting, “My invitation! My invitation!” But he grows dizzy, feels weak, his vision blurs, his legs give way beneath him, and he stops in the middle of the road, puts his hand over his eyes, and collapses amid the blare of car horns.

Tomorrow, in Le Parisien Libéré, there will be stories about the deaths of two people: a twenty-year-old Algerian, victim of an overdose in the middle of the street, and a drug dealer tortured to death in the toilets of the Adamantium, a recently opened nightclub, which has now been closed by the authorities.

30

“Those guys are looking for something. The only question, Hamed, is why they didn’t find it.”

Bayard chews his cigarette. Simon fiddles with paper clips.

Barthes run over, Saïd poisoned, his dealer murdered, his apartment trashed … Hamed decided it was time to go to the police, because he didn’t tell them everything he knew about Roland Barthes: during their last meeting, Barthes gave him a paper. The clatter of typewriters echoes through the offices. The Quai des Orfèvres hums with police and administrative activity.

No, the people who searched his apartment didn’t find it. No, it is not in his possession.

How can he be sure, then, that they haven’t got hold of it? Because it wasn’t hidden in his room. And for a very good reason: he burned it.

Okay.

Did he read it first? Yes. Can he tell them what it’s about? Sort of. What’s it about? Silence.

Barthes asked him to learn the document by heart and destroy it immediately. Apparently, the semiologist believed that the southern accent was a mnemonic technique that facilitated memorization. Hamed did it because even if Roland was old and ugly with his paunch and his double chin, deep down he liked him, this old man who talked about his mother like a heartbroken kid, and anyway he was flattered that this famous professor should entrust him with a mission that didn’t, for a change, involve the insertion of a penis into his mouth, and also because Barthes had promised him three thousand francs.

Bayard asks: “Could you recite the text to us?” Silence. Simon has stopped his construction of a paper-clip necklace. Beyond the door, the clatter of typewriters continues.

Bayard offers the gigolo a cigarette, which he accepts with his gigolo’s reflex, even though he doesn’t like dark tobacco.

Hamed smokes the cigarette and remains silent.

Bayard repeats that he is clearly in possession of an important piece of information that has caused the deaths of at least three people and that until this information is made public his life is in danger. Hamed objects that, on the contrary, as long as his brain is the sole repository of this information, he cannot be killed. His secret is his life insurance policy. Bayard shows him the photographs of the dealer who was tortured in the toilets of the Adamantium. Hamed stares at them for a long time. Then he tips backwards on his seat and begins to recite: “Happy who like Ulysses has explored / Or he who sought afar the golden fleece…” Bayard shoots a questioning look at Simon, who explains that it is a poem by Du Bellay: “When shall I hail again my village spires / The blue smoke rising from that village see…” Hamed says he learned the poem at school and he still remembers it. He seems quite proud of his memory. Bayard makes it clear to Hamed that he can hold him in custody for twenty-four hours. Hamed tells him to go ahead and do it. Bayard lights another Gitane with the butt of the last one and mentally adjusts his tactics. Hamed cannot go back home. Does he have a safe place to stay? Yes, Hamed can sleep at his friend Slimane’s place, in Barbès. He should go there and lie low for a while, not go out to his usual haunts, not open the door to any strangers, be careful when he does go out, turn around frequently in the street … he should hide, basically. Bayard asks Simon to accompany Hamed in the car. His intuition tells him that the gigolo will confide more easily in a young non-cop than in an old cop, and anyway, unlike all those cops in novels and films, he has other cases on the go; he can’t devote 100 percent of his time to this one, even if Giscard has made it a priority, and even if Bayard voted for him.

He gives the necessary orders for them to be provided with a vehicle. Before he lets them leave, he asks Hamed if the name Sophia means anything to him, but Hamed says he doesn’t know any Sophias. A uniformed bureaucrat with one finger missing takes them to the garage and issues the keys to an unmarked R16. Simon signs a form, Hamed gets in the passenger seat, and they leave the Quai des Orfèvres in the direction of Châtelet. Behind them, the black DS, which had been waiting patiently, double-parked by the side of the road, without any of the policemen on guard duty taking the slightest notice, sets off. At the crossroads, Hamed says to Simon (in his southern accent): “Oh! A Fuego, con!” It is blue.

Simon crosses the Île de la Cité, passes the law courts, and reaches Châtelet. He asks Hamed why he came to Paris. Hamed explains that Marseille is a tough place for queers; Paris is better, even if it’s no panacea (Simon notes the gigolo’s use of the word panacea): queers are treated better here, because in the provinces, being queer is worse than being Arab. And besides, in Paris, there are loads of queers with loads of money, and there’s more fun to be had. Simon drives through a yellow light at the Rue de Rivoli crossing and the black DS behind him runs the red to remain in close pursuit. The blue Fuego, though, stops. Simon explains to Hamed that he teaches Barthes at university and says carefully: “What’s it about, that document?” Hamed asks for a cigarette and says: “To be honest, I don’t know.”

Simon wonders if Hamed is stringing them along, but Hamed tells him that he learned the text by heart without seeking to understand it. His instructions were that if anything ever happened to Barthes, Hamed had to go somewhere to recite the text to one particular person, and no one else. Simon asks him why he hasn’t done this. Hamed asks what makes him think he hasn’t. Simon says he doesn’t believe Hamed would have gone to the police if he had. Hamed admits that he hasn’t done it, because the place is too far away: the person doesn’t live in France, and he didn’t have enough money. He chose to spend the three thousand francs Barthes gave him on other things.

In his rearview mirror Simon notices that the black DS is still behind them. At Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, he runs a red light and the DS does the same thing. He slows down, it slows down. He double-parks, just to be sure. The DS stops behind him. He feels his heart begin to pound a little. He asks Hamed what he wants to do later, when he has enough money, if that ever happens. Hamed doesn’t understand why Simon has stopped the car, to begin with, but he doesn’t ask questions and tells him that he’d like to buy a boat and organize trips for tourists, because he loves the sea, because he used to go fishing in little coves with his father when he was young (but that was before his father threw him out). Simon starts up suddenly, making his tires screech, and in his rearview mirror he sees the large black Citroën’s hydraulic suspension lifting it up from the tarmac. Hamed turns around and catches sight of the DS and then he remembers the car parked below his apartment, and below the party in Bastille, and he realizes that it has been following him for weeks and that they could have killed him ten times by now, but that that doesn’t mean they won’t kill him the eleventh time, so he grabs hold of the handle above the passenger-side window and says simply: “Take a right.”

Simon turns without thinking and finds himself in a little side street parallel to Boulevard Magenta, and what scares him most now is that the car behind him is not even attempting to conceal its presence. And so, as it moves closer again, guided by a vague inspiration, he slams on the brakes and the DS crashes into the back of the R16.

For a few seconds, the two cars are immobile, one behind the other, as if they had lost consciousness, and the passersby, too, seem petrified, stunned by the accident. Then he sees an arm emerge from the DS and a shiny metallic object and he thinks: that’s a gun. So he shoves the car into gear, missing first, which produces a horrible crunching noise, and the R16 leaps forward. The arm disappears and the DS also takes off.

Simon runs every traffic light he sees, honking his horn constantly, so much so that it sounds like an air-raid siren warning the Tenth Arrondissement of an imminent bombardment. Behind, the DS stays close to him, like a fighter plane that’s locked an enemy plane in its crosshairs. Simon hits a 505, bounces off a van, skids onto the pavement, almost runs over two or three passersby, and enters Place de la République. Behind him, the DS weaves between obstacles like a snake. Simon slaloms through traffic, avoiding pedestrians, and yells at Hamed: “The text! Recite the text!” But Hamed can’t concentrate; his hand is clinging to the handle above the window and not a single word escapes his lips.

Simon tries to think as he drives around Place de la République. He doesn’t know where the nearest police stations are, but he remembers attending a July 14 party in the fire station near the Bastille, in the Marais, so he piles down Boulevard des Filles-du-Calvaire and barks at Hamed: “What’s it about? What’s the title?” Hamed is pale, but manages to articulate: “The seventh function of language.” But just as he starts to recite it, the DS comes up alongside the R16, the passenger-side window opens, and Simon sees a man with a mustache pointing a pistol at him. Just before the gunshot, Simon slams on the brakes with all his strength and the DS overtakes them as the bullet leaves the gun, but a 404 behind him crashes into the back of the R16, shunting it forward until it is, once again, level with the DS, so Simon yanks the steering wheel to the left and sends the DS into the line of oncoming traffic. By some miracle, however, the DS avoids a blue Fuego coming the other way and escapes into a side road at Cirque d’Hiver, then disappears in Rue Amelot, which runs parallel to Boulevard Beaumarchais, an extension of Filles-du-Calvaire.

Simon and Hamed believe they’ve shaken off their pursuers, but Simon is still heading toward the Bastille—it doesn’t cross his mind to lose himself in the labyrinth of little streets in the Marais—so when Hamed starts to recite mechanically “There exists a function that eludes the various inalienable factors of verbal communication … and which, in a way, encompasses all of them. This function we shall call…,” at that very moment, the DS speeds out of a perpendicular street and smashes into the side of the R16, which collides with a tree in a howl of steel and glass.

Simon and Hamed are still in shock when a mustachioed man armed with a pistol and an umbrella bursts out of the smoking DS, rushes over to the R16, and pulls open the loose passenger door. He aims his pistol, straight-armed, at Hamed’s face and squeezes the trigger, but nothing happens. His pistol jams. He tries again—click click—but it doesn’t work, so he wields his closed umbrella like a sword and attempts to stick it between Hamed’s ribs, but Hamed protects himself with his arm, knocking aside the umbrella’s point, which sinks into his shoulder. The sudden pain provokes a high-pitched cry. Then, his fear turning to rage, he wrenches the umbrella from the man’s hands, releasing his safety belt in the same movement, launches himself at his aggressor, and stabs him in the chest with the umbrella.

While this is happening, the other man has gone around to the driver’s door. Simon is conscious and tries to get out of the R16, but his door is blocked—he’s trapped inside—and when the second mustachioed man aims his gun at him, he is paralyzed with terror and stares at the black hole the bullet will emerge from before perforating his head, and he has time to think “A lightning flash, then night!” when suddenly a buzzing noise fills the air and a blue Fuego crashes into the man, who is sent flying and lands in a crumpled heap on the pavement. Two Japanese men get out of the Fuego.

Simon escapes through the passenger door and crawls over to Hamed, who is slumped over the body of Mustache No. 1. He turns Hamed over and discovers, to his relief, that he is still alive. One of the Japanese men comes over and supports the wounded young gigolo’s head. He feels his pulse and says “Poison,” but Simon initially hears “poisson” and he thinks of Barthes’s analyses of Japanese food before understanding dawns on him as he looks at Hamed’s yellow complexion and yellow eyes and the spasms that shake his body, and he yells for someone to call an ambulance and Hamed tries to say something to him, he struggles to sit up a bit, and Simon leans over and asks about the function but Hamed is completely incapable of reciting a word because everything is whirling inside his head: he sees his poor childhood in Marseille again and his life in Paris, his friends, his tricks, the saunas, Saïd, Barthes, Slimane, the cinema, croissants at La Coupole, and the silken reflections of the oiled bodies that he rubbed himself against, but just before dying, while the sirens scream in the distance, he has time to whisper: “Echo.”

31

When Jacques Bayard arrives, the police have secured the area but the Japanese have disappeared and so has Mustache No. 2, the man knocked over by the Fuego. Hamed’s body is still laid out flat on the pavement alongside his attacker’s, whose umbrella is sticking out of his chest. Simon Herzog is smoking a cigarette, a blanket wrapped around him. No, he has nothing. No, he doesn’t know who those Japanese guys are. They didn’t say anything, they just saved his life and then left. With the Fuego. Yes, the second mustachioed man is probably injured. He must be hard as nails to have gotten up after being hit like that in the first place. Jacques Bayard contemplates the two wrecked cars, perplexed. Why a DS? Production of that model ended in 1975. The Fuego, on the other hand, is so new that it’s fresh from the factory and is not yet on sale. Someone draws an outline in chalk around Hamed’s corpse. Bayard lights a Gitane. So the gigolo’s calculation was wrong: the information he possessed did not protect him. Bayard concludes that the men who killed him did not want to make him talk but to shut him up. Why? Simon tells him Hamed’s last words. Bayard asks what he knows about this seventh function of language. Still in shock, but professorial by instinct, Simon explains: “The functions of language are linguistic categories that were once the subject of a theory by a great Russian linguist named…”

Roman Jakobson.

Simon goes no further in the lecture he was about to give. He remembers the book on Barthes’s desk, Essays in General Linguistics by Roman Jakobson, opened at the page on the functions of language, and the sheet of notes that served as a bookmark.

He explains to Bayard that the document for which four people have already been killed was perhaps right under their noses when they searched the apartment on Rue Servandoni, and pays no heed to the policeman standing behind them who then walks away to make a telephone call once he’s heard enough. He cannot see that the policeman has a finger missing on his left hand.

Bayard, too, thinks he’s heard enough, even if he still doesn’t really understand this thing about Jakobson; he pushes Simon inside his 504 and zooms off toward the Latin Quarter, escorted by a van full of uniformed officers, including the one with the severed finger. They arrive in Place Saint-Sulpice, sirens howling, and that is probably a mistake.

There is an entry code beside the heavy double doors, and they have to hammer on the window of the concierge’s office. She opens it for them, stupefied.

No, nobody has asked to see the attic room. Nothing special has happened since the installation of the entry code by a Vinci technician last month. Yes, the one with the Russian accent, or maybe it was Yugoslav, or maybe Greek. Actually, it’s funny, he came back today. He said he wanted to do an estimate for installing an intercom. No, he didn’t ask for the key to the seventh-floor room, why? It’s hanging on the board, with the others, look. Yes, he went upstairs not five minutes ago.

Bayard takes the key and climbs the stairs two by two, followed by half a dozen policemen. Simon remains downstairs with the concierge. On the seventh floor, the door to the attic room is locked. Bayard inserts the key in the lock, but it’s obstructed by something: another key, on the inside. The key that was not found on Barthes, thinks Bayard, as he bangs on the door and shouts, “Police!” They hear a noise inside. Bayard orders the door smashed down. The desk looks intact, but the book is no longer there, nor is the page of notes, and there is nobody in the room. The windows are shut.

But the trapdoor to the apartment below is open.

Bayard screams at his men to get downstairs but by the time they have turned around, their prey is already on the stairs and they bump into Barthes’s brother, Michel, coming out of his apartment in a panic because an intruder just came through the hole in his ceiling. So the Vinci technician is now two floors below them, and on the ground floor, of course, Simon, who has no idea what is going on, is shoved out of the way by the man, who sprints out of the building at top speed, and when he slams the double doors shut behind him, the mechanism that he himself installed is triggered, locking them inside.

Bayard rushes into the concierge’s office and grabs the telephone. He wants to call for backup, but it’s a rotary phone and the time it takes him to compose the number feels enough for the man to have reached Porte d’Orléans, or maybe even the city of Orléans.

But the man is not going in that direction. He wants to escape by car, but two policemen left on guard outside prevent him from picking up his vehicle, parked at the end of the street, so he runs toward the Jardin du Luxembourg while behind him the two officers shout their first warnings. Through the double doors, Bayard shouts, “Don’t shoot!” He wants the man alive, of course. When his men finally manage to free the mechanism, by pressing on the button embedded in the wall, the guy has disappeared but Bayard has sounded the alert. He knows that the area is being sealed off and the man won’t get far.

The man runs through the Jardin du Luxembourg and he can hear the policemen blowing their whistles behind him, but the passersby, used to joggers and the park guards’ whistles, pay no notice until he finds himself face-to-face with a cop. The cop tries to tackle him, but the man runs smack into him, like a rugby player, knocks him down, steps over him, and continues running. Where is he going? Does he know? He changes direction. One thing is sure: he has to get out of the park before all the exits are blocked.

Bayard is now in the van, giving orders by radio. Police officers have fanned out around the Latin Quarter. The fugitive is surrounded. He’s screwed.

But this man is resourceful. He hurtles down Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a narrow one-way street, which prevents any cars from following him. For some reason known only to him, he must cross over to the Right Bank. Coming out of Rue Bonaparte, he runs onto the Pont-Neuf, but that is where his race ends, because at the other end of the bridge, police vans block the way, and when he turns around he sees Bayard’s van cutting off his retreat. He’s trapped like a rat. Even if he jumps in the river, he won’t get far, but maybe he has one last card to play, he thinks.

He climbs onto the parapet and holds out a piece of paper he has taken from his jacket. Bayard approaches him, alone. The man says one step farther and he’ll throw the paper in the Seine. Bayard stops dead, as if he’s just walked into an invisible wall. “Calm down.”

“Don’t come any nearrrer!”

“What do you want?”

“A car with a full tank of gas. If not, I thrrrow the document in the rrriver.”

“Go ahead, throw it in.”

The man’s arm twitches. Bayard shivers, in spite of himself. “Wait!” He knows that this scrap of paper might solve the mystery of at least four deaths. “Let’s talk, okay? What’s your name?” Simon has joined him. At both ends of the bridge, the police have the man in their sights. Out of breath, chest wheezing from the effort, he moves his other hand to his pocket. At that precise instant, there is the sound of a gunshot. The man swivels. Bayard yells: “Don’t shoot!” The man drops like a stone, but the paper flutters around above the river, and Bayard and Simon, who have rushed to the stone balustrade, lean over to watch the graceful curves of its erratic descent as if hypnotized. At last, it lands delicately on the water. And floats. Bayard, Simon, and the policemen who have instinctively understood that this document was their real objective, all stare, petrified, breath held, as the sheet of paper drifts along with the current.

Then Bayard tears himself from this contemplative torpor and, deciding that all hope is not yet lost, yanks off his jacket, his shirt, and his trousers, steps over the parapet, hesitates for a few seconds. And jumps. Disappears in a huge splash.

When he resurfaces, he is about sixty feet from the paper and, from up on the bridge, Simon and the policemen start shouting at him, all at the same time, indicating which direction to take, like supporters at a football match. Bayard starts swimming, as hard as he can. He tries to get closer, but the paper is carried away by the current. Still, the gap is gradually reduced. He’s close now, he’s going to catch it, only another ten feet, and then they disappear under the bridge and Simon and the policemen run to the other side and wait for them to reappear, and when they reappear the shouting starts up again. Three more feet and he’ll have it, but at that moment a riverboat passes, creating little waves that submerge the paper just as Bayard is about to reach out and grab it. The paper sinks, so Bayard dives after it, and for a few seconds all they can see is the pair of underpants he’s wearing, poking up out of the water. When he resurfaces, he is clutching the soaked paper in his hand and he swims doggedly over to the bank amid cheers and hurrahs.

But when he hauls himself onto the grass, he opens his hand and realizes that the sheet of paper is now merely a shapeless paste and that the writing has been dissolved because Barthes wrote with a fountain pen. This isn’t CSI and there will not be any way of making the text reappear: no magic scanner, no ultraviolet light. The document is lost forever.

The officer who fired the shot comes over to explain: he saw the man reaching for a gun in his pocket and he didn’t have time to think, so he fired. Bayard notes that the cop has a finger missing on his left hand. He asks him what happened. The policeman replies he had an accident while he was chopping wood at his parents’ house in the countryside.

When the police divers fish the corpse out of the water, they will find in his jacket pocket not a firearm but Barthes’s copy of Essays in General Linguistics, and Bayard, still drying himself, will ask Simon: “For fuck’s sake, who is this Jakobson guy?” And so, at last, Simon will be able to finish his lecture.

32

Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist, born at the end of the nineteenth century, who was at the inception of a movement named Structuralism. After Saussure (1857–1913) and Peirce (1839–1914), and along with Hjelmslev (1899–1965), he is probably the most important theoretician among the founders of linguistics.

Beginning with two stylistic devices taken from ancient rhetoric, namely the metaphor (replacing one word with another linked to it by some sort of resemblance, “raging bull” for the boxer Jake LaMotta, for example) and metonymy (replacing one word with another linked to it by contiguity: “having a glass” to say that one drinks the liquid in the glass—the container for the contents, for example), he succeeded in explaining the functioning of language according to two axes: the paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis.

Broadly speaking, the paradigmatic axis is vertical and concerns the choice of vocabulary: each time you pronounce a word, you choose it from a list that you have in mind and which you mentally scroll through. For example, “goat,” “economy,” “death,” “trousers,” “I-you-he,” or whatever.

Then you join it to other words: “belonging to Monsieur Seguin,” “stagnant,” “with his scythe,” “creased,” “undersigned,” to form a phrase: this chain is the horizontal axis, the word order that will enable you to make a sentence, then several sentences, and finally a speech. This is the syntagmatic axis.

With a noun, you must decide if it needs an adjective, an adverb, a verb, a coordinating conjunction, a preposition … and you must choose which adjective or which adverb or which verb: you renew the paradigmatic operation at each syntagmatic stage.

The paradigmatic axis makes you choose from a list of words in the equivalent grammatical class: a noun or a pronoun, an adjective or a relative proposition, an adverb, a verb, etc.

The syntagmatic axis makes you choose the order of words: subject-verb-complement or verb-subject or complement-subject-verb, and so on.

Vocabulary and syntax.

Each time you formulate a phrase, you are subconsciously practicing these two operations. The paradigmatic axis uses your hard disk, if you like, and the syntagmatic your processor. (Although I doubt whether Bayard knows much about computers.)

But in this particular case that is not what interests us.

(Bayard grumbles.)

Jakobson also summarized the process of communication with an outline that consists of the following elements: the sender, the receiver, the message, the context, the channel, and the code. It was from this outline that he drew the functions of language.

Jacques Bayard has no desire to learn more, but for the sake of the investigation he has to understand at least the broad outlines. So here are the functions:

• The “referential” function is the first and most obvious function of language. We use language to speak about something. The words used refer to a certain context, a certain reality, which one must provide information about.

• The “emotive” or “expressive” function is aimed at communicating the presence and position of the sender in relation to his or her message: interjections, modal adverbs, hints of judgment, use of irony, and so on. The way the sender expresses a piece of information referring to an exterior subject gives information about the sender. This is the “I” function.

• The “conative” function is the “you” function. It is directed toward the receiver. It is principally performed with the imperative or the vocative, i.e., the interpellation of whoever is being addressed: “Soldiers, I am satisfied with you!,” for example. (And remember, by the way, that a phrase is hardly ever reducible to a single function, but generally combines several. When he addresses his troops after Austerlitz, Napoleon marries the emotive function—“I am satisfied”—with the conative—“Soldiers/with you!”)

• The “phatic” function is the most amusing. This is the function that envisages communication as an end in itself. When you say “hello” on the telephone, you are saying nothing more than “I’m listening,” i.e., “I am in a situation of communication.” When you chat for hours in a bar with your friends, when you talk about the weather or last night’s soccer game, you are not really interested in the information per se, but you talk for the sake of talking, without any objective other than making conversation. In other words, this function is the source of the majority of our verbal communications.

• The “metalinguistic” function is aimed at verifying that the sender and the receiver understand each other, i.e., that they are using the same code. “You understand?,” “You see what I mean?,” “You know?,” “Let me explain…”; or, from the receiver’s point of view, “What are you getting at?,” “What does that mean?,” etc. Everything related to the definition of a word or the explanation of a development, everything linked to the process of learning a language, all references to language, all metalanguage, is the domain of the metalinguistic function. A dictionary’s sole function is metalinguistic.

• And finally, the last function is the “poetic” function. This considers language in its aesthetic dimension. Plays on the sounds of words, alliteration, assonance, repetition, echo or rhythm effects, all belong to this function. We find it in poems, of course, but also in songs, oratory, newspaper headlines, advertising, and political slogans.

Jacques Bayard lights a cigarette and says, “That’s six.”

“Sorry?”

“That’s six functions.”

“Ah … yes. Quite.”

“Isn’t there a seventh function?”

“Well, uh … apparently, there is, yes…”

Simon smiles stupidly.

Bayard wonders out loud what Simon is being paid for. Simon reminds him that he did not ask for anything and that he is there against his will, on the express orders of a fascist president who sits at the head of a police state.

Nevertheless, after thinking about it, or rather after rereading Jakobson, Simon Herzog does come up with a possible seventh function, designated as the “magic or incantatory function,” whose mechanism is described as “the conversion of a third person, absent or inanimate, to whom a conative message is addressed.” And Jakobson gives as an example a Lithuanian magical spell: “May this stye dry up, tfu tfu tfu tfu.” Yeah yeah yeah, thinks Simon.

He also mentions this incantation from northern Russia: “Water, queen of rivers, aurora! Take the sadness beyond the blue sea, to the bottom of the sea, and never let it weigh down the happy heart of God’s servant…” And, for good measure, a citation from the Bible: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed” (Joshua 10:12).

Fair enough, but that all sounds pretty anecdotal. You can’t really consider it a separate function; at most, it is a slightly crazy use of the conative function for an essentially cathartic effect, poetic at best, but completely ineffective: the magical invocation works only in fairy tales, by definition. Simon is convinced that this is not the seventh function of language, and in any case Jakobson only mentions it in passing, in the interests of completeness, before returning to his serious analysis. The “magical or incantatory function”? A negligible curiosity. A nonsensical footnote. Nothing worth killing for, in any case.

33

“By the spirits of Cicero, tonight, let me tell you, my friends, it is going to rain enthymemes! I can see some have been revising their Aristotle, and I know some others who know their Quintilian, but will that be enough to overcome the lexical snares in the slalom race of syntax? Caw caw! The spirit of Corax is speaking to you. Glory to the founding fathers! Tonight, the victor will win a trip to Syracuse. As for the defeated … they will have their fingers trapped in the door. Well, it’s always better than your tongue … And don’t forget: today’s orators are tomorrow’s tribunes. Glory to the logos! Long live the Logos Club!”

34

Simon and Bayard are in a room that is half-laboratory, half-armory. In front of them, a man in a white coat is examining the mustachioed man’s pistol, which should have obliterated Simon’s brain. (“He’s Q,” thinks Simon.) The ballistics expert commentates as he inspects the weapon: “Nine millimeter; eight shots; double action; steel, finished in bronze, walnut butt; weight: 730 grams without the magazine.” It looks like a Walther PPK, he says, but the safety is the other way around: it’s a Makarov PM, a Soviet pistol. Except that …

Firearms, the expert explains, are like electric guitars. Fender, for instance, is an American firm that produces the Telecaster used by Keith Richards or Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster, but there are also Mexican or Japanese models produced under franchise, which are replicas of the original U.S. version: cheaper and generally less well finished, although often well-made.

This Makarov is a Bulgarian, not a Russian, model, which is probably why it jammed: the Russian models are very reliable, the Bulgarian copies slightly less so.

“Now, you’re going to laugh, Superintendent,” says the expert, showing him the umbrella that was removed from the man’s chest. “You see this hole? The point is hollow. It functions like a syringe, fed through the handle. All you have to do is press this trigger and it opens a valve that, with the aid of a compressed air cylinder, releases the liquid. The mechanism is impressively simple. It’s identical to the one used to eliminate Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident, two years ago in London. You remember?” Superintendent Bayard does indeed remember that the murder had been attributed to the Bulgarian secret services. At the time, they were using ricin. But now they have a stronger poison, botulinum toxin, which acts by blocking neuromuscular transmission, thus provoking muscle paralysis and causing death in a matter of minutes, either by asphyxia or by stopping the heart.

Bayard, looking pensive, fiddles with the umbrella’s mechanism.

Would Simon Herzog happen to know any Bulgarians in the academic world?

Simon thinks.

Yes, he does know one.

35

The two Michels, Poniatowski and d’Ornano, have reported for duty in the president’s office. Giscard stands anxiously by the ground-floor window, looking out on the Élysée Gardens. As d’Ornano is smoking, Giscard asks him for a cigarette. Poniatowski, sitting in one of the luxurious armchairs in the informal part of the office, has poured himself a whiskey, which he puts down on the coffee table in front of him. He speaks first: “I talked to my contacts, who are in touch with Andropov.” Giscard says nothing because, like all men with this much power, he expects his employees to save him the bother of asking important questions. So Poniatowski replies to the silent question: “According to them, the KGB is not involved.”

Giscard: “What makes you think that opinion is credible?”

Ponia: “Several things. The most convincing being that in the short term they would not have any use for such a document. At a political level.”

Giscard: “Propaganda is critical in those countries. The document could be very useful to them.”

Ponia: “I doubt it. You can’t really say that Brezhnev has encouraged freedom of expression since he succeeded Khrushchev. There are no debates in the USSR, or only within the Party, and the public aren’t aware of those. So what counts is not the power of persuasion but the relative strengths of political forces.”

D’Ornano: “But it’s perfectly imaginable that Brezhnev or another member of the Party might want to use it internally. The central committee is a vipers’ nest. It would be a considerable asset.”

Ponia: “I can’t imagine Brezhnev wanting to assert his preeminence in that way. He doesn’t need to. The opposition is nonexistent. The system is locked in place. And no Central Committee member could order such an operation for his own profit without the authorities being informed.”

D’Ornano: “Except Andropov.”

Ponia (irritated): “Andropov is a shadowy figure. But he has more power as head of the KGB than he would have in any other position. I can’t see him embarking on a political adventure.”

D’Ornano (ironic): “True. Shadowy figures rarely do things like that. Talleyrand and Fouché had no political ambitions at all, did they?”

Ponia: “Well, they didn’t realize those ambitions.”

D’Ornano: “That’s debatable. At the Congress of Vienna—”

Giscard: “All right. What else?”

Ponia: “It seems highly improbable that the operation would have been carried out by the Bulgarian services without the approval of their big brother. On the other hand, it is possible to envisage Bulgarian agents selling their services to private interests. It is up to us to determine the nature of those private interests.”

D’Ornano: “Do the Bulgarians have that little control over their men?”

Ponia: “Corruption is widespread. No part of society is free of it, least of all the intelligence services.”

D’Ornano: “Secret agents working freelance in their spare time? Frankly…”

Ponia: “Secret agents working for several employers? It’s not exactly unheard of.” (He drains his glass.)

Giscard (stubbing out his cigarette in a little ivory hippopotamus that serves as an ashtray): “Agreed. Anything else?”

Ponia (leaning back in his chair, arms behind his head): “Well, it turns out Carter’s brother is a Libyan agent.”

Giscard (surprised): “Which one? Billy?”

Ponia: “Andropov seems to have got this from the CIA. Apparently, he thought it was hilarious.”

D’Ornano (getting them back to the subject at hand): “So, what are we going to do? If in doubt, wipe them out?”

Ponia: “The president does not need the document. He just needs to know that the opposition doesn’t have it.”

As far as I know, no one has ever pointed out that Giscard’s famous speech impediment became more pronounced during moments of embarrassment or pleasure. He says: “Of coursh, of coursh … But if we could find it … or at leasht locate it, and if poshible, get our handzh on it, I would resht more eazhily. For the shake of Fransh. Imagine if thish document fell into, uh, the wrong handzh … Not that … But, well…”

Ponia: “Then we have to make Bayard’s mission clearer: get hold of the document, without letting anyone read it. Let’s not forget that that young linguist he’s hired is capable of deciphering it and therefore using it. Or of ensuring that every copy of it is destroyed. [He gets up and walks over to the drinks table, muttering.] A lefty. Bound to be a lefty…”

D’Ornano: “But how can we know if the document has already been used?”

Ponia: “According to my information, if someone used it we would know about it pretty damn quickly…”

D’Ornano: “What if they were discreet? Kept a low profile?”

Giscard (leaning against the sideboard under the Delacroix, and fingering the Legion of Honor medals in their boxes): “That doesn’t seem very plausible. Power, of whatever kind, is intended to be used.”

D’Ornano (curious): “Is that true for the atomic bomb?”

Giscard (professorial): “Especially the atomic bomb.”

The mention of a possible end to the world plunges the president into a light daydream for a moment. He thinks of the A71 highway which must cross the Auvergne, of the mayor’s office in Chamalières, of the France over which he rules. His two employees wait respectfully for him to start speaking again. “In the meantime, all our actions should be governed by a single objective: preventing the left from gaining power.”

Ponia (sniffing a bottle of vodka): “As long as I’m alive, there will be no Communist ministers in France.”

D’Ornano (lighting a cigarette): “Exactly. You should slow down if you want to get through the election.”

Ponia (raising his glass): “Na zdrowie!”

36

“Comrade Kristoff … You know, of course, who is the greatest politician of the twentieth century?”

Emil Kristoff was not summoned to Lubyanka Square, but he would have preferred that.

“Naturally, Yuri Vladimirovich. It’s Georgi Dimitrov.”

The faux-intellectual tenor of his meeting with Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, in an old bar located in a basement, as nearly all the bars in Moscow are, is not designed to reassure him, and the fact that they are in a public place changes nothing. You can be arrested in a public place. You can even die in a public place. He is well placed to know this.

“A Bulgarian.” Andropov laughs. “Who would have believed it?”

The waiter puts two small glasses of vodka and two large glasses of orange juice on the table, with two fat gherkins on a little plate, and Kristoff wonders if this is a clue. Around him, people smoke, drink, and talk loudly, and that is the first rule when you want to be sure that a conversation cannot be overheard: meet in a noisy place, full of random sounds, so that any microphones hidden nearby cannot isolate a particular voice. If you are in an apartment, you should run a bath. But the simplest solution is to go out for a drink. Kristoff observes the customers’ faces and spots at least two agents in the room, but he presumes there must be more.

Andropov continues on the subject of Dimitrov: “If you think about it, it was there for all to see during the Reichstag trial. The conflict between Göring, who is summoned as a witness, and Dimitrov, in the dock, anticipated the fascist aggression to come, the heroic Communists’ resistance, and our final victory. That trial is highly symbolic of the superiority of communism from every point of view, political and moral. Dimitrov is majestic and mocking, and masters the historical dialectic perfectly, even as he risks his life, faced with the angry, fist-waving Göring … What a spectacle! Göring, who just happens to be president of the Reichstag, prime minister and minister of the interior for Prussia. But Dimitrov reverses their roles, and it is Göring who has to respond to his questions. Dimitrov completely demolishes him. Göring is furious: he stamps his feet, like a little boy who’s been told he can’t have any dessert. Facing him, imperious in the dock, Dimitrov reveals the madness of the Nazis to the world. Even the president of the tribunal realizes it. It’s hilarious because you’d think he was asking Dimitrov to forgive fat Göring’s behavior. He says to him—I remember this as if it were yesterday—‘Given that you are spouting Communist propaganda, you should not be surprised if the witness is so agitated.’ Agitated! And then Dimitrov says he is fully satisfied with the prime minister’s response. Ha ha! What a man! What a talent!”

Kristoff sees allusions and deeper meanings everywhere, but he tries to keep things in perspective because he knows that his paranoia makes it difficult for him to assess the KGB chairman’s words correctly. All the same, the fact that he was summoned to Moscow is, indisputably, a clue in itself. He does not wonder if Andropov knows something. He wonders what he knows. And that is a much harder question to answer.

“Back then, people all over the world said: ‘There is only one man left in Germany, and that man is Bulgarian.’ I knew him, Emil, were you aware of that? A born orator. A master.”

While he listens to Andropov praising the great Dimitrov, Comrade Kristoff assesses his own situation. There is nothing more uncomfortable for someone preparing to lie than being uncertain how much the person he is about to lie to knows. At some point, he realizes, he will have to gamble.

And that moment arrives: ending his disquisition on Dimitrov, Andropov asks his Bulgarian counterpart for clarification on the latest reports that have reached his desk in Lubyanka Square. What exactly is this operation in Paris?

So, here we are. Kristoff feels his heart accelerate, but is careful not to breathe more quickly. Andropov bites into a gherkin. He must decide now. Either admit the operation or claim to know nothing about it. But this second option has the disadvantage of making you look incompetent, which, in the world of intelligence, is never a good idea. Kristoff knows exactly how a good lie works: it must be drowned in an ocean of truth. Being 90 percent truthful enables you to render the 10 percent you are attempting to conceal more credible, while reducing the risks of contradicting yourself. You buy time and you avoid becoming muddled. When you lie, you must lie about one point—and one only—and be perfectly honest about the rest. Emil Kristoff leans toward Andropov and says: “Comrade Yuri, you know Roman Jakobson? He’s a compatriot of yours. He wrote some very nice things about Baudelaire.”

37

My Julenka,

I got back from Moscow yesterday. The visit went well, or at least I think it did. I got back, in any case. We had a few drinks, me and the old guy. He was friendly and seemed pretty drunk by the end of the night, but I don’t believe he really was. I do the same thing sometimes, pretending to be drunk in order to win people’s trust or get them to lower their guard. But as you can probably guess, I didn’t lower mine. I told him everything he wanted to know except, obviously, I didn’t mention you. I said I didn’t believe in the manuscript’s power, and that was why I didn’t inform him about the Paris mission, because I wanted to be sure first. But as certain agents in my service did believe in it, I decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so I sent a few agents, and I told him that they’d been overzealous. Apparently, the French services are investigating at the moment, but Giscard is pretending not to know anything about it. Maybe you can use your husband’s connections to find out? Either way, you should be very careful, and now that the old man is watching me, I won’t be able to send you any extra men.

The van driver got here safely, and so did the fake doctor who gave you the document. The French will never be able to find them—they’ve gone on holiday to the Black Sea, and they are the only people who could possibly lead anyone to you, along with the two other agents who died and the one who’s stayed there to oversee the investigation. I know he was wounded, but he’s tough. You can count on him. If the police find anything, he’ll know what to do.

Allow me to give you some advice. You must file away a copy of that document. We are used to keeping and hiding precious documents that must absolutely not be lost but whose contents cannot under any circumstances be divulged to anyone else. You must make a copy of it, one only, and give it for safekeeping to someone trustworthy who has no idea what it’s about. Keep the original on you.

One other thing: look out for Japanese people.

All right, that is my advice for you, my Juleshka. Make good use of it. I hope you’re well and that everything will go as planned, even if I know from experience that nothing ever goes as planned.

Your old father who watches over you,

Tatko

PS: Write back to me in French. It’s safer, and anyway I need to practice.

38

There is some faculty housing at the École Normale Supérieure, behind the Panthéon. We are in a large apartment, and the weary-looking, white-haired man with bags under his eyes says:

“I’m alone.”

“Where is Hélène?”

“I don’t know. We had another row. She had a horrible tantrum about something absurd. Or maybe that was me.”

“We need you. Can you keep this document? You mustn’t open it, you mustn’t read it, and you mustn’t talk to anyone about it, not even Hélène.”

“Okay.”

39

Hard to imagine what Julia Kristeva is thinking in 1980. The idea that Sollers’s histrionic dandyism, his so-very-French libertinism, his pathological boasting, his adolescent-pamphleteer style, and his shock-the-bourgeoisie habits could have seduced the young Bulgarian girl, newly arrived from Eastern Europe … yes, I can buy that. Fifteen years later, one might suppose that she is somewhat less under his spell, but who knows? What seems obvious is that their partnership is solid, that it has functioned perfectly from the beginning, and that it is still functional now: a tightly knit team with clearly defined roles. For him, the pretentious bullshit, society parties, and clownish nonsense. For her, the icy, venomous, structuralist Slavic charm, the arcana of academia, the management of mandarins, the technical, institutional, and, inevitably, bureaucratic aspects of their rise. (He “doesn’t know how to write a check,” so the story goes.) Together, they are a formidable political war machine already, working toward the heights of an exemplary career in the next century: when Kristeva receives the Legion of Honor from the hands of Nicolas Sarkozy, Sollers, also present, will be sure to mock the president for pronouncing “Barthès” instead of “Barthes.” Good cop, bad cop. They get their cake full of honors and they eat it with insolence. (Later, François Hollande will elevate Kristeva to the ranks of commandeur. Presidents come and go, people with meaningless medals remain.)

In summary: an infernal duo, and a political double-act. Let’s keep that in mind.

When Kristeva opens the door and sees that Althusser has come with his wife, she cannot or prefers not to suppress a grimace of displeasure. Hélène, Althusser’s wife, is well aware of what these people think of her and gives an evil grin in return, the two women’s instinctive hatred instantly bordering on a sort of complicity. For his part, Althusser looks like a guilty child as he hands over a small bouquet of flowers. Kristeva rushes off to put them in a sink. Visibly under the influence of the aperitifs he’s had, Sollers welcomes the two arrivals with phony exclamations of delight: “So, my dear friends, how are you?… We were just waiting for you to come … before we sat down to eat … Dear Louis, a martini … as usual?… red!… oh wow!… Hélène … what would you like to drink?… I know … a Bloody Mary!… hee hee!… Julia … will you bring the celery … my darling?… Louis!… how’s the Party?”

Hélène observes the other guests like an old, nervous cat, recognizing no one but BHL, who she’s seen on the television, and Lacan, who has come with a tall young woman in a black leather suit. Sollers makes the introductions while they sit down, but Hélène doesn’t bother trying to remember anyone’s name: there is a young New York couple in sports clothes, a Chinese woman who either works for the embassy or as a trapeze artist for the Peking Circus, a Parisian publisher, a Canadian feminist, and a Bulgarian linguist. “The avant-garde of the proletariat,” Hélène says to herself, laughing.

The guests have barely sat down when Sollers unctuously begins a discussion about Poland: “Now that is a subject that will never go out of fashion!… Solidarnosc, Jaruzelski, yes, yes … from Mickiewicz and Slovacki to Walesa and Wojtyla … We could be talking about it in a hundred years, a thousand years, but it will still be bowed beneath the yoke of Russia … it’s practical … it makes our conversations immortal … And when it’s not Russia, it’s Germany, of course, hmm?… Agh, come on, come on … comrades … To die for Gdansk … to die for Danzig … What delicious nonsense!… What’s that phrase again?… Oh yes: six of one and half a dozen of the other…”

The provocation is aimed at Althusser, but the old philosopher is so dull-eyed as he sips his martini that he looks like he might drown in it. So Hélène, with the boldness of a small wild animal, replies on his behalf: “I understand your solicitude toward the Polish people: I don’t think they sent any members of your family to Auschwitz.” And as Sollers hesitates for a second (just one) before following up with some provocative insult to the Jews, she decides to drive home her advantage: “But what about this new pope, do you like him?” (She plunges her nose into her plate.) “I wouldn’t have thought so.” (She imitates a working-class intonation.)

Sollers opens his arms wide, as if beating his wings, and declares enthusiastically: “This pope is just my type!” (He bites into an asparagus spear.) “Isn’t it sublime when he gets off his plane and kisses the ground?… Whichever country he’s in, the pope gets down on his knees, like a beautiful prostitute preparing to give you a blow job, and he kisses the ground…” (He waves his half-eaten asparagus.) “What can you do? This pope is a kisser … How could I not like him?”

The New York couple giggle as one. Lacan lifts his hand and squeaks like a little bird, but decides not to speak. Hélène, who like any good Communist is single-minded, asks: “And you think he likes libertines? Last I heard, he wasn’t very open on sexuality.” (She glances over at Kristeva.) “Politically, I mean.”

Sollers laughs noisily, the sign that he is about to embark on his usual strategy of abruptly changing the subject to pretty much anything that comes to mind: “That’s because he’s badly advised … Anyway, I’m sure he’s surrounded by homosexuals … The homosexuals are the new Jesuits … but on things like that, they’re not necessarily that well advised … Except … apparently there’s a new disease that’s decimating them … God said: be fruitful and multiply … The rubber johnny … What an abomination!… Sterilized sex … Horny bodies that don’t touch each other anymore … Pfft … I’ve never used a rubber in my life … Wrap up my dick like some meat in a supermarket?… Never!”

At this moment, Althusser wakes up:

“If the USSR attacked Poland, it was for highly strategic reasons. They had to prevent Hitler from moving close to the Russian border at all costs. Stalin used Poland as a buffer: by taking up a position on Polish soil, he was insuring himself against the coming invasion…”

“And that strategy, as everyone knows, worked like a dream,” says Kristeva.

“After Munich, the Nazi-Soviet Pact had become a necessity. More than that, an inevitability,” Althusser continues.

Lacan makes a sound like an owl. Sollers pours himself another drink. Hélène and Kristeva stare at each other. It is still not clear if the Chinese woman speaks French, nor, for that matter, the Bulgarian linguist or the Canadian feminist or even the New York couple, until Kristeva asks them, in French, if they’ve played tennis recently (they are, we discover, doubles partners, and Kristeva talks for quite a while about their last match, when she proved herself astonishingly combative, to her own surprise, as she is essentially not a very good player, she’s at pains to make clear). But Sollers, always happy to change the subject, does not let the couple reply:

“Ah, Borg!… The messiah who came in from the cold … When he falls to his knees on Wimbledon’s grass … arms outstretched … that blond hair … his bandana … his beard … it’s Jesus Christ on Centre Court … If Borg wins Wimbledon, it’s for the redemption of all mankind … And, as there’s a lot of redeeming to do, he wins every year … How many victories will it take to wash our sins away?… Five … Ten … Twenty … Fifty … A hundred … A thousand…”

“I thought you prefer McEnroe,” says the young New Yorker in his New York–accented French.

“Ah, McEnroe … the man you love to hate … a dancer, that one … the grace of the devil … But he should have actually flown around the court … McEnroe is Lucifer … the most beautiful of all the angels … Lucifer always falls in the end…”

While he embarks on a biblical exegesis in which he compares St. John with McEnroe, Kristeva slips into the kitchen with the Chinese woman on the pretext of serving the main course. Lacan’s young mistress takes off her shoes under the table. The Canadian feminist and the Bulgarian linguist look at each other questioningly. Althusser plays with the olive in his martini. BHL bangs his fist on the table and says: “We must intervene in Afghanistan!”

Hélène looks around at everyone.

She says: “And not in Iran?” The Bulgarian linguist adds mysteriously: “Hesitation is the mother of the fantastical.” The Canadian feminist smiles. Kristeva returns with the leg of lamb and the Chinese woman. Althusser says: “The Party was wrong to support the invasion of Afghanistan. You shouldn’t invade a country with a press release. The Soviets are smarter than that: they’ll withdraw.” Sollers asks mockingly: “The Party? How many divisions have they got?” The publisher looks at his watch and says: “France is slow.” Sollers smiles as he looks at Hélène and says: “One is not serious at seventy.” Lacan’s mistress uses her bare foot to caress BHL’s crotch. He is hard within seconds.

The conversation drifts toward Barthes. The publisher delivers an ambiguous eulogy. Sollers explains: “Lots of homosexuals have given me the same strange impression, now and then—as if they’re being eaten up from inside…” Kristeva points out to the eleven guests: “As I’m sure you know, we were very close. Roland adored Philippe and [she sounds suddenly modest and mysterious] he liked me very much.” BHL insists on adding: “He could never stand Marxism-Leninism.” The publisher: “He adored Brecht, though.” Hélène, venomously: “And China? What did he think of China?” Althusser frowns. The Chinese woman looks up. Sollers replies in a relaxed way: “Boring. But no more than the rest of the world.” The Bulgarian linguist, who knew Barthes well: “Except for Japan.” The Canadian feminist, who did her master’s under Barthes, remembers: “He was very welcoming and very lonely.” The publisher says knowingly: “Yes and no. He knew how to surround himself … when he wanted to. He wasn’t without resources, in spite of everything.” Lacan’s mistress slides farther down her chair to massage BHL’s balls with her toes.

BHL is imperturbable: “It’s good to have a master. But you must know how to detach yourself from him. With me, for example, at the École Normale—” Kristeva interrupts him with a dry laugh: “Why are the French so obsessed with their education? They can’t go two hours without mentioning it. It reminds me of old soldiers.” The publisher agrees: “That’s true. In France, we’re all nostalgic for our school days.” Sollers says teasingly: “Well, some stay in school all their lives.” But Althusser doesn’t react. Hélène grinds her teeth at this middle-class compulsion: imagining their own experience holds for everyone. She didn’t like school, and she didn’t stay there long either.

The doorbell rings. Kristeva gets up to open it. In the entrance hall, she can be seen talking to a badly dressed man with a mustache. The conversation lasts less than a minute. Then she comes back to the table as if nothing happened, saying simply (and her accent resurfaces for a second): “Sorrrry, just some borrring work stuff. For my office.” The publisher goes on: “In France, academic success has too much influence on social success.” The Bulgarian linguist stares at Kristeva: “But thankfully, it is not the only factor. Isn’t that true, Julia?” Kristeva says something in Bulgarian. Then the two of them begin talking in their native language: brief, muttered replies. If there is any hostility between them, the ambience around the table makes it impossible for the other guests to detect it. Sollers intervenes: “Come on, now, children, no whispering, ha ha…” Then he addresses the Canadian feminist: “So, my dear friend, how is your novel going? I agree with Aragon, you know … The woman is the future of the man … and therefore of literature … because the woman is death … and literature is always on the side of death…” And while he vividly imagines the Canadian peeling back his foreskin, he asks Kristeva if she would like to go and fetch dessert. Kristeva gets to her feet and starts clearing the table, helped by the Chinese woman, and while the two women disappear once again into the kitchen, the publisher takes out a cigar and cuts the end off it with the bread knife. Lacan’s mistress continues to perform contortions on her chair. The New York couple hold hands and smile politely. Sollers imagines a foursome with the Canadian and tennis rackets. BHL, hard as a rock, says they should invite Solzhenitsyn next time. Hélène scolds Althusser: “You pig! You made a stain!” She wipes his shirt with a napkin dipped in a little sparkling water. Lacan quietly sings a sort of Jewish nursery rhyme. The others pretend not to notice. In the kitchen, Kristeva grabs the Chinese woman by the waist. BHL says to Sollers: “When you think about it, Philippe, you’re better than Sartre: Stalinist, Maoist, papist … He always seems to be wrong, but you!… You change your mind so quickly that you don’t have time to be wrong.” Sollers sticks a cigarette in his cigarette holder. Lacan mumbles: “Sartre does not exist.” BHL continues: “In my next book, I—” Sollers interrupts him: “Sartre said that all anti-Communists are dogs … I say that all anti-Catholics are dogs … Anyway, it’s very simple: there is not a Jew of any worth who hasn’t been tempted to convert to Catholicism … Isn’t that true?… Darling, are you going to bring us dessert?” From the kitchen, Kristeva’s muffled voice replies that it’s coming.

The publisher says to Sollers that he might publish Hélène Cixous. Sollers replies: “Poor Derrida…” BHL again sees fit to tell everyone: “I have a great deal of affection for Derrida. He was my tutor at the École. Along with you, dear Louis. But he is not a philosopher. I can think of only three French philosophers who are still alive: Sartre, Levinas, and Althusser.” Althusser does not react to this flattery. Hélène conceals her irritation. The American man asks: “What about Pierre Bowrdieu—isn’t he a good philosopher?” BHL replies that he went to the École Normale but he is certainly not a philosopher. The publisher explains to the American that Bourdieu is a sociologist who did a lot of work on invisible inequalities, and cultural, social, symbolic capital … Sollers makes a show of yawning. “Above all, he is boring beyond belief … His habitus … Yes, we are not all equal—who would have guessed? And, allow me to let you all in on a little secret … shhh … gather around and listen … It has always been like that and it always will be … Incredible, huh?”

Sollers becomes more and more garbled: “Rise above! Rise above! Abstraction, quick!… We’re not Elsa and Aragon, no more than Sartre and Beauvoir. Wrong!… Adultery is a criminal conversation … Oh yeah … oh yeah … And while we’re at it … Here. Now. Really here … Really now … Fashion is often true…” His gaze wavers between the Canadian and Hélène. “The Maoist affair? It was our age’s entertainment … China … Romanticism … I’ve had to write some incendiary things, it’s true … I’m a great heckler … The best in the country…”

Lacan is miles away. His mistress’s foot is still caressing BHL’s crotch. The publisher waits for it all to stop. The Canadian and the Bulgarian feel united in silent solidarity. Hélène endures the great French writer’s monologue in mute rage. Althusser feels something dangerous rising within him.

Kristeva and the Chinese woman finally return with an apricot tart and a clafouti; their hastily reapplied lipstick burns passionately. The Canadian asks how the French will vote in next year’s elections. Sollers explodes: “Mitterrand has only one destiny: defeat … he will fulfil it completely…” Always prompt to issue reminders, Hélène asks him: “You’ve had lunch with Giscard, haven’t you? What’s he like?”

“Who, Giscard?… Pfft, a hypocrite and a degenerate … You know the aristocratic bit of his name is from his wife?… Our dear Roland had it right … a very successful bourgeois specimen, he said … Ah, we wouldn’t be safe from a new May ’68 … if we were still in ’68…”

“The structures … in the street…” murmurs Lacan, on his last legs.

“In America, his public image is as a brilliant, dynamic, and ambitious patrician,” says the American woman. “But up to now he hasn’t made much of an impression internationally.”

“He hasn’t bombed Vietnam, that’s for sure,” rasps Althusser, wiping his mouth.

“He did intervene in Zaire, though,” says BHL. “And he loves Europe.”

“Which brings us back to Poland,” says Kristeva.

“Oh no, we’re not going to talk about Poland anymore tonight!” says Sollers, taking a drag through his cigarette holder.

“Yes, we could talk about East Timor, for example,” says Hélène. “That would make a change. I haven’t heard the French government condemning the massacres committed by Indonesia.”

“Think about it,” says Althusser, apparently emerging from his fog once again. “One hundred and thirty million inhabitants, a huge market, and a precious ally of the United States in a region of the world where they don’t have many.”

“That was delicious,” says the American woman, finishing her clafouti.

“Another cognac, gentlemen?” asks Sollers.

Suddenly, the young woman who is still playing footsie with BHL’s balls asks who this Charlus is who everyone’s talking about in Saint-Germain. Sollers smiles: “He’s the most interesting Jew in the world, my dear … And another faggot, as it happens…”

The Canadian says that she would like a cognac, too. The Bulgarian offers her a cigarette, which she lights with a candle. The house cat rubs against the Chinese woman’s legs. Someone mentions Simone Veil: Hélène hates her, so Sollers defends her. The American couple think that Carter will be reelected. Althusser starts trying to seduce the Chinese woman. Lacan lights one of his famous cigars. They talk for a bit about soccer, and young Platini, who everyone agrees is promising.

The evening draws to a close. Lacan’s mistress will go home with BHL. The Bulgarian linguist will accompany the Canadian feminist. The Chinese woman will go back alone to her delegation. Sollers will fall asleep and dream about the orgy that didn’t happen. Out of nowhere, Lacan makes this observation, in a tone of infinite weariness: “It’s curious how a woman, when she ceases being a woman, can crush the man she has under her thumb … Yes, crush him. For his own good, of course.” There is embarrassed silence among the other guests. Sollers declares: “The king is he who wears on his sleeve the most vivid experience of castration.”

40

This thing about the severed fingers must be cleared up, so Bayard decides to put a tail on the policeman who shot the Bulgarian on the Pont-Neuf. But as he has the uneasy feeling that the police force has been infiltrated by an enemy whose identity—and, in truth, whose nature—he knows nothing about, he doesn’t ask his superiors to organize this tail, but tells Simon to do it. As usual, Simon protests, but this time he thinks he has a valid objection: that policeman saw him on the Pont-Neuf; Simon was with the others when Bayard dived into the Seine, and then the two of them were seen together, deep in discussion, after he emerged from the water.

Never mind. He can disguise himself.

How?

They’ll cut his hair and get him out of those rags that make him look like an overgrown student.

This is too much. He’s been fairly easygoing up to now, but Simon is categorical: it’s absolutely out of the question.

Bayard, who knows about public employment, brings up the thorny question of transfers. What will become of young Simon (or not so young, actually; how old is he?) once he has finished his thesis? He could easily be transferred to a secondary school in Bobigny. Or maybe they could help get him tenure at Vincennes?

Simon doesn’t believe things work like that in National Education, and that string-pulling by Giscard in person (especially Giscard!) will not help him get a job at Vincennes (the university of Deleuze, of Balibar!), but he is not entirely sure. On the other hand, he is sure that a transfer to somewhere unappealing as a form of punishment is perfectly possible. So he goes to the hairdresser and gets his hair cut—short enough that he feels genuinely uneasy as he contemplates the results, as if he were a stranger to himself, recognizing his face but not the identity that he has unwittingly constructed, year after year—and he lets the Ministry of the Interior pay for a suit and tie. Despite not being cheap, the suit is rather so-so, inevitably a bit big in the shoulders, a little short at the ankles, and Simon has to learn not only to tie his tie but to make the wide part cover the narrow part neatly. And yet, once his metamorphosis is complete, standing in front of the mirror, he surprises himself by feeling—beyond that sensation of strangeness mixed with repulsion—a sort of curiosity and interest in this image of himself, himself without being him, a him from another life, a him who decided to work in a bank or in insurance, or for a government organization, or as a diplomat. Instinctively, Simon adjusts the knot of his tie and, beneath the cuffs of his jacket, pulls at the sleeves of his shirt. He is ready for his mission. And the part of him that appreciates the playful aspects of existence decides to try enjoying this little adventure.

Outside the Quai des Orfèvres he waits for the policeman with the missing finger to finish his shift, and he smokes a Lucky Strike paid for by France, because the other upside of being under government orders is that he has the right to an expense account. So he has kept the receipt from the tobacconist (three francs).

Finally, the policeman appears. He’s out of uniform, and the tailing operation begins, on foot. Simon follows the man as he crosses the Pont Saint-Michel and goes up the boulevard until he reaches the junction with Saint-Germain, where he takes a bus. Simon hails a taxi and, uttering the strange words “Follow that bus,” he feels as if he has wandered into a movie, though what genre of movie he isn’t yet sure. But the driver obeys without asking questions, and at each stop Simon has to make sure that the plainclothes policeman has not gotten off the bus. The man is middle-aged, of average height and build and not easy to spot in a crowd, so Simon has to be vigilant. The bus goes up Rue Monge, and the man gets off at Censier. Simon stops the taxi. The man enters a bar. Simon waits a minute before following him. Inside, the man is sitting at a table at the back. Simon sits near the door and immediately realizes this is a mistake because the man keeps looking over in his direction. It is not because he has identified him, just because he is expecting someone. In order not to attract attention, Simon looks out the window. He contemplates the ballet of students entering and emerging from the metro station, standing about smoking cigarettes or gathering in groups, still undecided about what will happen next, happy to be together, excited about the future.

But suddenly, it is not a student that he sees coming out of the metro but the Bulgarian who almost killed him during the car chase. He’s wearing the same crumpled suit and apparently hasn’t thought it worthwhile to shave off his mustache. He looks around the square, then comes toward Simon. He is limping. Simon hides his face behind the menu. The Bulgarian opens the door of the café. Instinctively, Simon shrinks back, but the Bulgarian passes without seeing him and heads to the back of the room, where he sits down with the policeman.

The two men begin a conversation in low voices. This is the moment that the waiter chooses to take Simon’s order. The apprentice detective asks for a martini, without thinking. The Bulgarian lights a cigarette, a foreign brand that Simon doesn’t recognize. Simon, too, lights up, a Lucky Strike, and takes a drag to calm his nerves, convincing himself that the Bulgarian hasn’t seen him and that his disguise means no one has recognized him. Or maybe the whole café has spotted his too-short trouser hems, his too-baggy jacket, his shifty amateur air? It isn’t difficult, he thinks, to perceive the dichotomy between the envelope he is wrapped in and the deeper reality of his being. Simon is overwhelmed by the awful feeling—yes, familiar but more intense this time—of being an impostor, on the verge of being unmasked. The two men have ordered beers. All things considered, they don’t seem to have noticed Simon, just—to his great surprise—like the bar’s other customers. So Simon pulls himself together. He tries to listen to the conversation by concentrating on the voices of the two men, isolating them amid the general hubbub, like a sound engineer isolating a single track on a mixing desk. He thinks he hears “paper” … “script” … “contact” … “student” … “service” … “carrr” … But perhaps he is the puppet of a sort of autosuggestion; perhaps he is only hearing what he wants to hear; perhaps he is constructing the elements of his own dialogue? He thinks he hears: “Sophia.” He thinks he hears: “Logos Club.”

Then he feels a presence, a shape that glides past him. He didn’t notice the current of air released by the opening of the café door, but he hears the sound of a chair being pulled back. He turns and sees a young woman sitting down at his table.

Smiling, blond, high cheekbones, eyebrows in a V. She says to him: “You were with the policeman in Salpêtrière, weren’t you?” Simon feels sick. He glances furtively over at the back of the room: the two men, absorbed by their conversation, can’t possibly have heard her. “That poorrr Monsieur Barthes,” she adds, and he shivers again. He recognizes her now: she is the nurse with the slender legs, the one who found Barthes with his tubes removed, the day when Sollers, BHL, and Kristeva turned up and made a scene. More important, he thinks, she recognized him, which undermines his confidence about the quality of his disguise. “He was so verrry sad.” The accent is light, but Simon detects it. “Are you Bulgarian?” The young woman looks surprised. She has large brown eyes. She can’t be more than twenty-one. “No, why? I’m Rrrussian.” From the back of the room, Simon hears laughter. He risks another glance. The two men are clinking glasses. “My name is Anastasia.”

Simon is a bit muddled, but all the same he does wonder what a Russian nurse is doing in a French hospital, in 1980, a time when the Soviets have begun to relax certain restrictions, but not to the point of opening their borders. He also didn’t know that French hospitals were recruiting from the East.

Anastasia tells him her life story. She arrived in Paris when she was eight. Her father was head of the Champs-Élysées Aeroflot office. He was authorized to bring his family with him, and when Moscow summoned him back to headquarters, he applied for political asylum and they stayed, along with her mother and her little brother. Anastasia became a nurse; her brother is still in high school.

She orders tea. Simon still doesn’t know what she wants. He tries to calculate her age based on the date she arrived in France. She gives him a childlike smile: “I saw you through the window. I decided I had to talk to you.” The sound of a chair scraping on the floor at the back of the room. The Bulgarian gets up, to piss or use the phone. Simon leans forward and puts his hand to his temple to mask his profile. Anastasia dips her tea bag in the hot water and Simon sees something graceful in the movement of the young woman’s wrist. At the counter, a customer is talking about the situation in Poland, then Platini’s performance against Holland, then the invincibility of Borg at Roland-Garros. Simon can sense that he is losing concentration. This young woman turning up has unhinged him, and his nervousness is increasing every minute. And now, God knows why, he has the Soviet national anthem in his head, with its cymbal crashes and its Red Army choirs. The Bulgarian comes out of the toilets and goes back to his seat.

“Soyuz nerushimy respublik svobodnykh…”

Some students enter the café and join their friends at a noisy table. Anastasia asks Simon if he’s a cop. At first, Simon protests: of course he’s not a cop! But then—he has no idea why—he makes clear that he is acting as, let’s say, a consultant to Superintendent Bayard.

“Splotila naveki velikaya Rus’…”

At the table at the back, the policeman says “tonight.” Simon thinks he hears the Bulgarian reply with a short phrase containing “Christ.” He contemplates the girl’s childlike smile and thinks that, through storm clouds, the sunlight of freedom is shining on him.

Anastasia asks him to tell her about Barthes. Simon says that he was very fond of his mother and of Proust. Anastasia knows Proust, of course. And the great Lenin illuminated our path. Anastasia says that Barthes’s family was worried because he didn’t have his keys on him, so they wanted to change the locks, which would cost money. We were raised by Stalin to be true to the people. Simon recites this couplet to Anastasia, who informs him that, after Khrushchev’s report, the anthem’s words were altered and the reference to Stalin removed. (This did not happen until 1977, however.) Whatever, thinks Simon, we grew our army in battles … The Bulgarian stands up and puts on his jacket; he’s about to leave. Simon considers following him, but prudently decides to stick to his mission. We shall in battle decide the fate of generations. The Bulgarian looked him in the eyes when he tried to execute him. The policeman never did. It’s less dangerous, more certain that way, and he knows, now, that the cop is mixed up in the business somehow. On his way out, the Bulgarian stares at Anastasia, who smiles at him sweetly. Simon feels death brush past him. His whole body stiffens, he lowers his head. Then the policeman leaves. Anastasia smiles at him, too. Well, she’s a woman who is used to being looked at, Simon thinks. He watches the policeman head up toward Monge and knows he must react quickly if he doesn’t want to lose him, so he takes out a twenty-franc note to pay for the tea and the martini and, without waiting for his change (but pocketing the receipt), he takes the nurse by the arm and leads her out of the café. She seems a little surprised but lets him do it. “Partiya Lenina, sila narodnaya…” Simon smiles at her. He felt like getting some fresh air and he’s in a bit of a rush; would she like to accompany him? In his head, he finishes the chorus: “… Nas k torzhestvu kommunizma vedyot!” Simon’s father is a Communist, but he doesn’t see any need to mention this to the young woman, who thankfully seems amused by his slightly eccentric behavior.

They walk about thirty feet behind the policeman. Night has fallen. It’s a bit cold. Simon is still holding the nurse’s arm. If Anastasia finds his attitude strange or cavalier, she doesn’t show it. She tells him that Barthes was very popular—too popular, in her opinion. There were always people trying to get into his room. The policeman turns off toward La Mutualité. She tells him that on the day of the incident, when he was found on the floor, the three people who came in and made a scene really insulted her. The policeman goes down a small street near the square outside Notre-Dame. Simon thinks about the friendship of peoples. He explains to Anastasia that Barthes was renowned for his ability to detect the symbolic codes that govern our behavior. Anastasia nods, frowning. The policeman comes to a halt outside a heavy wooden door, set just below the pavement. By the time Simon and Anastasia get there, he has disappeared inside. Simon stops. He still hasn’t let go of Anastasia’s arm. She says nothing, having noticed the rising tension in the air. The two young people look at the iron gate, the stone staircase, the wooden door. Anastasia frowns again.

A couple that Simon did not hear approaching walk around them, open the gate, descend the steps, and ring the doorbell. The door is half-opened, and a pasty-faced man of indeterminate age, a cigarette in his mouth, wool scarf wrapped around his neck, stares at the couple and then lets them through.

Simon wonders: “What would I do if I were in a novel?” He would ring the doorbell, obviously, and walk in with Anastasia on his arm.

Inside, there would be a secret gambling den. He’d sit at the policeman’s table and challenge him to a game of poker while Anastasia sipped a Bloody Mary beside him. He would ask the man in a knowing voice what had happened to his finger. And the man, equally knowing, would reply threateningly: “Hunting accident.” Then Simon would win the hand with a full house, aces over queens.

But life is not a novel, he thinks, and they carry on walking as if nothing had happened. When he turns around at the end of the street, however, he sees another three people ring the doorbell and enter. Equally, he does not see the dented Fuego parked on the opposite pavement. Anastasia starts telling him about Barthes again: when he was conscious, he asked for his jacket several times, as if he were looking for something. Does Simon have any idea what it might have been? Realizing that his mission is over for tonight, Simon feels as if he is waking up and, finding himself standing next to the young nurse, he is disconcerted. He stammers that, maybe, if she’s free, they could have a drink together. Anastasia smiles (and Simon is unable to interpret the sincerity of this smile): isn’t that what they just did? Simon, piteously, suggests they have another drink, another time. Anastasia stares deeply into his eyes, smiles again, as if upping the ante on her natural smile, and tells him simply: “Maybe.” Simon takes this as a rejection, and he is probably right because, repeating “another time,” she leaves without giving him her phone number.

In the street, behind him, the Fuego’s headlights come on.

41

“Approach, great speakers, fine rhetoricians, deep-lunged orators! Take your place in the lair of madness and reason, the theater of thought, the academy of dreams, the school of logic! Come and hear the clamor of words, admire the interlacing of verbs and adverbs, taste the venomous circumlocutions of the duelers of discourse! Today, for this new session, the Logos Club is offering not one digital combat, not two, but three, yes, three digital combats, my friends! And now, to whet your appetite, the first joust pits two rhetoricians against each other with the following thorny geopolitical question: Will Afghanistan be the Soviets’ Vietnam?

“Glory to the logos, my friends! Long live dialectics! Let the party begin! May the verb be with you!”

42

Tzvetan Todorov is a skinny guy in glasses with a big tuft of curly hair on the top of his head. He is also a linguistics researcher who has lived in France for twenty years, a disciple of Barthes who worked on literary genres (fantasy, in particular), a specialist in rhetoric and semiology.

Bayard has come to interrogate him, at Simon’s suggestion, because he was born in Bulgaria.

Having grown up in a totalitarian country evidently aided the development of a very strong humanist conscience, which comes out even in his linguistic theories. For example, he believes that rhetoric can truly blossom only in a democracy, because it requires a venue for debate that, by definition, neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship can offer. As proof, he cites the fact that in imperial Rome, and later, in feudal Europe, the science of discourse abandoned its objective of persuasion, focusing not on the receiver’s interpretation but on the spoken word itself. Speeches were no longer expected to be effective, simply beautiful. Political issues were replaced by purely aesthetic issues. In other words, rhetoric became poetic. (This is what is known as the seconde rhétorique.)

He explains to Bayard, in immaculate French but with a still very noticeable accent, that the Bulgarian secret services (the KDC), as far as he knows, are active and dangerous. They are supported by the KGB and are therefore in a position to mount sophisticated operations. Assassinating the pope? Maybe not, but they are certainly capable of eliminating individuals whose existence is inconvenient. That said, he does not see why they would be involved in Barthes’s accident. What possible interest could they have in a French literary critic? Barthes was not political and had never had any contact with Bulgaria. Sure, he went to China, but you couldn’t say he returned a Maoist, any more than he did an anti-Maoist. He was neither a Gide nor an Aragon. When he came back from China, Barthes’s anger, Todorov remembers, was focused mainly on the quality of Air France’s in-flight meals: he even thought of writing an article on the subject.

Bayard knows that Todorov has pinpointed the central difficulty of his investigation: discovering a motive. But he also knows that in the absence of any other information he must make do with the objective evidence at his disposal—a pistol, an umbrella—and, even though in theory he sees no geopolitical implications in Barthes’s murder, he continues to interrogate the Bulgarian critic about the secret services of his country of origin.

Who is in charge of them? A Colonel Emil Kristoff. His reputation? Not especially liberal, but not particularly well versed in semiology either. Bayard has the unhappy impression that he is going farther down a dead end. After all, if the two killers had been from Marseille or Yugoslavia or Morocco, what would he have deduced from that? Without knowing it, Bayard is thinking like a structuralist: he wonders if the Bulgarian connection is relevant. He mentally reviews the other clues that he has not yet investigated. Just to be sure, he asks:

“Does the name Sophia mean anything to you?”

“Well, yes, it’s the city where I was born.”

Sofia.

So the Bulgarian lead really is a lead, after all.

At this moment, a beautiful young Russian woman in a dressing gown makes her appearance and crosses the room, discreetly greeting the visitor. Bayard thinks he can detect an English accent. So maybe this bespectacled egghead doesn’t lead such a boring life. He notes automatically the silent, erotic complicity between the Anglophone woman and the Bulgarian critic, the sign of a relationship that he assesses—not that he cares, it’s just a professional reflex—as being either nascent or adulterous or both.

While he’s at it, he asks Todorov if “echo,” the last word pronounced by Hamed, means anything to him. And the Bulgarian replies: “Yes, have you heard from him recently?”

Bayard does not understand.

“Umberto. How is he?”

43

Louis Althusser holds the precious sheet of paper in his hand. The discipline of the Party, which formed him, his obedient temperament, his years as a docile prisoner of war, all command him not to read the mysterious document. At the same time, his rather un-Communist individualism, his fondness for enigmas, his historical propensity to cheat, all encourage him to unfold the page. If he did, not knowing but suspecting what it contains, his act would join the long list of dishonesties that started with a fraudulent 17/20 on a philosophy dissertation in his classe préparatoire for the École Normale Supérieure (a sufficiently important episode in his personal mythology that he thinks about it all the time). But he is afraid. He knows what they’re capable of. He decides, wisely (spinelessly, he feels), not to read the document.

But, then, where should he hide it? He looks at the great mess piled up on his desk and thinks of Poe: he slips the page into an open envelope that had contained some flyer (for a local pizzeria, say, or maybe a bank; I don’t remember what kinds of flyers we got in our mailboxes back then); what matters is that he places this envelope on his desk, clearly visible amid a clutter of manuscripts, works-in-progress, and rough drafts, almost all devoted to Marx, Marxism, and, in particular—in order to draw out the “practical” consequences of his recent “antitheoreticist autocriticism”—to the unpredictable material relationship between “popular movements” and the ideologies to which they have given themselves or in which they have invested. The letter will be safe here. There are also a few books—Machiavelli, Spinoza, Raymond Aron, André Glucksmann—that look as if they have been read, which is not the case (he thinks about this often, as part of his carefully constructed neurosis that he is an impostor) for most of the thousands of books that fill his shelves: Plato (well, he read that), Kant (never read), Hegel (leafed through), Heidegger (skimmed), Marx (read volume 1 of Capital, but not volume 2), etc.

He hears the key in the door. It’s Hélène, coming home.

44

“What’s it about?”

The bouncer looks like every other bouncer in the world except that he is wearing a thick wool scarf and he is white, ageless, gray-skinned, with a cigarette stub in his mouth, and his gaze is not expressionless, staring behind you as if you weren’t there, but malignant and staring right into you, as if trying to read your soul. Bayard knows he cannot show his card, because he must remain incognito in order to see what happens behind this door, so he gets ready to invent some pathetic lie, but Simon, struck by sudden inspiration, beats him to it and says: “Elle sait.”

The wood creaks, the door opens. The bouncer moves aside and, with an ambiguous gesture, invites them in. They enter a vaulted cellar that smells of stone, sweat, and cigarette smoke. The room is full, as if for a concert, but the people have not come to see Boris Vian and the walls have forgotten the jazz chords that once ricocheted from them. Instead, amid the vague hubbub of preshow conversations, a voice like a circus ringmaster’s declaims:

“Welcome to the Logos Club, my friends. Come demonstrate, come deliberate, come praise and criticize the beauty of the Word! O Word that sweeps away hearts and commands the universe! Come attend the spectacle of litigants jousting for oratory supremacy and for your utmost pleasure!”

Bayard gives Simon a puzzled look. Simon whispers into his ear that Barthes’s last words were not the beginning of a phrase, but two initials. Not “elle sait” (she knows), but “LC” for “Logos Club.” Bayard looks impressed. Simon shrugs modestly. The voice continues to warm up the room:

“My zeugma is beautiful, and so is my asyndeton. But there is a price to pay. Tonight you will know the price of language once again. Because this is our motto, and this should be the law of the world: None may speak with impunity! At the Logos Club, fine words are not enough. Are they, my darlings?”

Bayard goes up to an old white-haired man who has two phalanges missing on his left hand. In a tone he hopes sounds neither professional nor like a tourist, Bayard asks: “What’s going on here?” The old man stares at him without hostility: “First time? Then I would advise you just to watch. Don’t rush to join in. You have plenty of time to learn. Listen, learn, progress.”

“Join in?”

“Well, you could always play a friendly, of course—that won’t cost you anything—but if you’ve never seen a session before, you’d be better off staying a spectator. The impression your first combat leaves will be the basis of your reputation, and reputation is important: it’s your ethos.”

He takes a drag from a cigarette held between his mutilated fingers while the invisible ringmaster, hidden in some dark corner of the stone vaults, continues at the top of his voice: “Glory to the Great Protagoras! Glory to Cicero! Glory to the Eagle of Meaux!” Bayard asks Simon who these people are. Simon tells him that the Eagle of Meaux is Bossuet. Bayard again feels an overriding desire to slap him.

“Eat stones like Demosthenes! Long live Pericles! Long live Churchill! Long live de Gaulle! Long live Jesus! Long live Danton and Robespierre! Why did they kill Jaurès?” At least Bayard knows those people. Well, apart from the first two.

Simon asks the old man about the rules of the game. The old man explains to them: all the matches are duels; they draw a subject; it is always a closed question to which the answer is either yes or no, or a “for or against” type of question, so that the two adversaries can defend their opposing positions.

“Tertullian! Augustine! Maximilian! Let’s go!” yells the voice.

The first part of the evening consists of friendly matches. The real matches come at the end. There is always one, sometimes two. Three is rare, but it does happen. Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of official matches but, for reasons that the old man thinks obviously don’t need explaining, there is not exactly a long line of volunteers.

“Disputatio in utramque partem! Let the debate begin! And here are two smooth talkers, who will do battle over the lively question: Is Giscard a fascist?”

Shouting and whistling in the crowd. “May the gods of antithesis be with you!”

A man and a woman take their places on the stage, each behind a lectern, facing the audience, and start scribbling notes. The old man explains to Bayard and Herzog: “They have five minutes to prepare, then they make a presentation where they set out their point of view and the broad outlines of their argument. After that, the dispute begins. The duration of the contest varies and, like a boxing match, the judges can call a halt whenever they like. The person who speaks first has an advantage because he chooses the position he will defend. The other one is obliged to adapt and to defend the opposite position. For friendly matches featuring two opponents of the same rank, they draw lots to see who will begin. But in official matches between opponents of differing ranks, it is the lower-ranked player who goes first. You can tell from the kind of subject they get; this is a level-one meeting. Both of them are speakers. That is the lowest tier in the hierarchy of the Logos Club. Private soldiers, basically. Above that, there are the rhetoricians, and then the orators, the dialecticians, the peripateticians, the tribunes, and, at the very top, the sophists. But here, people rarely get past level three. I’ve heard there are very few sophists, only about ten, and they all have code names. Once you get to level five, it becomes very sealed off. I’ve even heard it said that the sophists don’t exist, that level seven has been invented to give people in the club a sort of unreachable goal, so they’ll fantasize about the idea of an unattainable perfection. Personally, I’m sure they exist. In fact, I reckon de Gaulle was one of them. He might even have been the Great Protagoras himself. That’s what president of the Logos Club is called, so they say. I’m a rhetorician. I made it to orator one year, but I couldn’t hold on to it.” He lifts up his mutilated hand. “And it cost me dear.”

The duel commences, everyone falls silent, and Simon is unable to ask the old man what he means by a “real match.” He observes the audience: mostly male, but all ages and types are represented. If the club is elitist, its criteria are apparently not financial.

The first duelist’s melodious voice rings out, explaining that in France, the prime minister is a puppet; that Article 49-3 castrated Parliament, which has no power; that de Gaulle was a benevolent monarch in comparison with Giscard, who is concentrating all the power in his own hands, including the press; that Brezhnev, Kim Il-Sung, Honecker, and Ceausescu were at least accountable to their parties; that the president of the United States possesses far less power than our own leader, and that while the president of Mexico cannot stand for reelection, the French president can.

He is up against a fairly young speaker. She responds that all one need do to verify that we are not in a dictatorship is read the newspapers (like Le Monde, earlier this week, which ran a headline about the government reading: “Failure across the board”; and there have been more severe criticisms than that…), and she offers as proof the attacks by Marchais, Chirac, Mitterrand, etc. For a dictatorship, there is a healthy amount of freedom of expression. And, talking of de Gaulle, let’s not forget what was said about him: de Gaulle is fascist. The Fifth Republic is fascist. The Constitution is fascist. The Permanent Coup d’Etat, etc. Her peroration goes on: “To say that Giscard is a fascist is an insult to history; it is to spit on the victims of Mussolini and Hitler. Go and ask the Spanish what they think. Go and ask Jorge Semprun if Giscard is Franco! Shame on rhetoric when it betrays the past!” Prolonged applause. After a brief deliberation, the judges declare the young woman the victor. Looking thrilled, she shakes her opponent’s hand, then gives the audience a little curtsy.

There is a series of debates. The candidates are happy or unhappy, the audience applauds or boos, there is whistling, there is yelling … and then we come to the climax of the night: the “digital duel.”

Subject: The written word versus the spoken word.

The old man rubs his hands: “Ah! A metasubject! Using language to discuss language, there’s nothing better. I adore that. Look, their levels are shown on the board: it’s a young rhetorician challenging an orator so he can take his place. So it’s the rhetorician who goes first. I wonder which point of view he’ll choose. There is often one argument that’s harder to make but if you want to impress the jury and the audience it can be a good idea to choose the difficult one. With the more obvious positions, it can be harder to shine, because what you say is likely to be more straightforward, less spectacular…”

The old man stops talking. The match is about to start. There is a fevered silence as everyone in the room listens intently. The aspirant orator begins his speech confidently:

“Religions of the Book forged our societies and we made their texts sacred: the Tablets of Stone, the Ten Commandments, the Torah scroll, the Bible, the Koran, and so on. To be valid, it must be engraved. I say: fetishism. I say: superstition. I say: dogmatism.

“It is not I who affirms the superiority of the spoken word, but he who made us what we are, o thinkers, o rhetoricians, the father of dialectics, our common ancestor, the man who without ever writing a single book laid the foundations of all Western thought.

“Remember! We are in Egypt, in Thebes, and the king asks: What is the point of writing? And the god responds: It is the ultimate cure for ignorance. And the king says: On the contrary! In fact, this art will breed forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it because they will stop using their memories. The act of remembering is not memory, and the book is merely an aide-mémoire. It does not offer knowledge, it does not offer understanding, it does not offer mastery.

“Why would students need professors if they could learn everything they need from books? Why do they need what is in those books to be explained? Why are there schools and not just libraries? Because the written word alone is never enough. All thought is alive on the condition that it is exchanged; if it is frozen in place, it is dead. Socrates compares writing to painting: the beings created by painting stand in front of us as if they were alive; but when we question them, they remain petrified in a formal pose and don’t speak a word. And the same goes for writing. One might believe that the written word can speak; but if we question it, because we wish to understand it, it always repeats the same thing, down to the last syllable.

“Language produces a message, which has meaning only to the extent that it has a recipient. I am speaking to you now; you are the raison d’être of my speech. Only madmen speak in the desert. And the madman also talks to himself. But in a text, to whom are the words addressed? To everyone! And thus to no one. When each discourse has been written down for good and all, it passes indifferently to those who understand it and those who have no interest in it. A text without a precise recipient is a guarantee of imprecision, of vague and impersonal words. How could any message be suited to everyone? Even a letter is inferior to any kind of conversation: it is written in a certain context, and received in another. Besides, both the author’s and the recipient’s situation will have changed later. It is already obsolete; it was addressed to someone who no longer exists, and its author no longer exists either, vanished in the depths of time as soon as the envelope was sealed.

“So that’s how it is: writing is dead. The place for texts is in textbooks. Truth lives only in the metamorphoses of discourse, and only the spoken word is sensitive enough to capture thought’s eternal developing flow in real time. The spoken word is life: I prove it, we prove it, gathered here today to speak and listen, to exchange, to discuss, to debate, to create living thought together, to be as one in the word and the idea, animated by the forces of dialectics, alive with that sonorous vibration we call speech, of which the written word is only the pale symbol, when all’s said and done: what the score is to music, nothing more. And I will end with one final quotation from Socrates, as I am speaking under his high patronage: ‘The appearance of knowledge, rather than true knowledge,’ that is what writing produces. Thank you for your attention.”

Prolonged applause. The old man seems excited: “Ah, ah! The kid knows his Classics. That was good stuff. Socrates, the guy who never wrote a book—a no-brainer, in this context! He’s a bit like the Elvis of rhetoric, isn’t he? And, tactically, he played safe because defending the spoken word legitimizes the club’s activity, of course; the mise en abyme! The other one will have to respond now. He has to find something solid to base his argument on, too. If it were me, I’d do it like Derrida: strip the whole thing of context, explain that a conversation is no more personalized than a text or a letter because no one, when he speaks or when he listens, really knows who he is or who the other person is. There is never any context. It’s a con! Context does not exist. That’s the way to go! Well, that’d be how I’d refute it, anyway. First you have to demolish your opponent’s beautiful edifice, and afterward, you just have to be precise. The superiority of writing is a bit academic, you see, it’s pretty technical, but it’s not exactly a bundle of laughs. Me? Yeah, I took night classes at the Sorbonne. I was a mailman. Ah! Shh, here it comes! Go on, my son, show us how you won your rank!”

And the whole room falls silent when the orator, an older, graying man, more composed and less ardent in his body language, stands ready to speak. He looks at the audience, his opponent, the jury, and he says, lifting his index finger, one word:

“Plato.”

Then he says nothing, long enough to produce the feeling of unease that always accompanies a prolonged silence. And when he senses that the audience is wondering why he is wasting so many precious seconds of his speaking time, he explains:

“My honorable adversary attributed his quotation to Socrates, but you knew better, didn’t you?”

Silence.

“He meant Plato. Without whose writings Socrates, his thought, and his magnificent defense of the spoken word in Phaedo, which my honorable adversary quoted for us almost in its entirety, would have remained unknown to us.”

Silence.

“Thank you for your attention.” He sits down.

The entire room turns toward his opponent. If he wishes, he can speak again and engage in a debate, but, looking very pale, he says nothing. He has no need to wait for the verdict of the three judges to know that he has lost.

Slowly, courageously, the young man walks forward and places his hand flat on the judges’ table. The whole room holds its breath. The smokers suck nervously on their cigarettes. Everyone thinks he can hear the echo of his own breathing.

The man sitting in the middle of the jury lifts a cleaver and chops off the young man’s little finger.

The victim does not cry out, but folds up in two. In a cathedral-like silence, his wound is immediately cleaned and bandaged. The severed phalanx is picked up, but Simon does not see if it is thrown away or kept somewhere, to be exhibited with others in labeled jars revealing the date and subject of the debate.

The voice rings out once again: “Praise to the duelists!” The audience chants back: “Praise to the duelists!”

In the graveyard silence, the old man explains in a whisper: “Generally, when you lose, you wait quite a while before you try your luck again. It’s a good system: it weeds out the compulsive challengers.”

45

This story has a blind spot that is also its genesis: Barthes’s lunch with Mitterrand. This is the crucial scene that has not taken place. And yet it did take place … Jacques Bayard and Simon Herzog will never know, never knew what happened that day, what was said. They could barely even get hold of the guest list. But I can, maybe … After all, it’s all a question of method, and I know how to proceed: interrogate the witnesses, corroborate, discard any tenuous testimonies, confront these partial memories with the reality of history. And then, if need be … You know what I mean. There is more to be done with that day. February 25, 1980, has not yet told us everything. That’s the virtue of a novel: it’s never too late.

46

“Yes, what Paris needs is an opera house.”

Barthes wishes he were elsewhere. He has better things to do than make small talk. He regrets having agreed to this lunch: his leftist friends will give him hell again, although at least Deleuze will be happy. Foucault, of course, will utter a few contemptuous barbs, and make sure they are repeated by others.

“Arab fiction no longer hesitates to question its limits. It wants to struggle out of the straitjacket of classicism, break free from the conceptual novel…”

This is probably the price he has to pay for having eaten lunch with Giscard. “A very successful grand bourgeois”? Yes, certainly, but these bourgeois have done pretty well, too … Come on, once the wine’s been poured, you have to drink it. And actually, it is pretty good, this white. What is it? Chardonnay, I reckon.

“Have you read the latest Moravia? I like Leonardo Sciascia. Do you read Italian?”

What distinguishes them? Nothing, in principle.

“Do you like Bergman?”

Look at the way they stand, speak, dress … Without a shadow of a doubt the habitus of the Right, as Bourdieu would say.

“With the possible exception of Picasso, no other artist can rival Michelangelo’s critical standing. And yet nothing has been said about the democratic nature of his work!”

And me? Do I have right-wing habitus? Being badly dressed is not enough to get off the hook. Barthes touches the back of his chair to check that his old jacket is still there. Calm down. No one’s going to steal it. Ha! You’re thinking like a bourgeois.

“Modernity? Pfft! Giscard dreams of a feudal France. We’ll see if the French people are looking for a master or a guide.”

He doesn’t so much speak as plead. Every inch a lawyer. Some good smells coming from the kitchen.

“It’s coming, it’s almost ready! And you, my good sir, what are you working on at the moment?”

On words. A smile. A knowing look. No need to go into details. A little Proust, that always goes down well.

“You won’t believe me, but I have an aunt who knew the Guermantes.” The young actress is quite spiky. Very French.

I feel tired. What I really wanted was to take an anti-rhetorical path. But it’s too late now. Barthes sighs sadly. He hates being bored, and yet so many opportunities are offered to him, and he accepts them without really knowing why. But today is a little different. It’s not as if he didn’t have anything better to do.

“I’m friends with Michel Tournier. He’s not at all as wild as you’d imagine, ha ha.”

Oh, look, fish. Hence the white.

“Come and sit down, ‘Jacques’! You’re not going to spend the whole meal in the kitchen, are you?”

The curly-haired young man with goatlike features finishes serving his hot pot and comes to join us. He leans on the back of Barthes’s chair before sitting down next to him.

“It’s a cautriade: a mix of different fish. There’s red mullet, whiting, sole, mackerel, along with shellfish and vegetables, spiced up by a dash of vinaigrette, and I put a bit of curry in it with a pinch of tarragon. Bon appétit!”

Oh yes, that’s good. It’s chic and at the same time working-class. Barthes has often written about food: steak-frites, the simple ham sandwich, milk and wine … But this is something else, obviously. It has an aura of simplicity, but it has been cooked and prepared with effort, care, love. And also, always, a show of strength. He has already theorized about this in his book on Japan: Western food—accumulated, dignified, swollen into the majestic, linked to some prestigious operation—always tends toward excess, abundance, copiousness; Eastern food goes in the opposite direction, it blossoms into the infinitesimal: the future of the cucumber is not its piling up or its thickening, but its division.

“It’s a Breton fishermen’s meal: it was cooked originally using seawater. The vinaigrette was meant to counterbalance the salt’s thirst-inducing effect.”

Memories of Tokyo … To divide the baguette, pull it apart, pick at it, spread it open, instead of cutting and gripping it, as we do with our cutlery; never assault the food …

Barthes does not object when his glass is filled again. Around the table, the guests eat in a somewhat intimidated silence, and he observes that little man with the hard mouth who vacuums up his mouthfuls of whiting with a light sucking sound that is proof of a good bourgeois education.

“I declared that power was property. That is not entirely false, of course.”

Mitterrand puts down his spoon. The silent listeners stop eating to indicate to the little man that they are concentrating on what he says.

If Japanese cuisine is always prepared in front of the person who will eat it (a distinguishing mark of this cuisine), it is perhaps because it is important to consecrate the death of what we honor by this spectacle …

It’s as if they’re afraid to make a sound, like the audience at a theater.

“But it’s not true either. As I think you know better than I do, isn’t that so?”

No Japanese dish possesses a center (an alimentary center, implied for us by the rite that consists in ordering the meal, in surrounding or coating the dish); everything ornaments everything else: primarily because on the table, on the plate, the food is always a collection of fragments …

“The real power is language.”

Mitterrand smiles. His voice has taken on a fawning tone Barthes didn’t suspect it of possessing, and he realizes that the politician is talking directly to him. Farewell, Tokyo. The moment he feared (but which he knew was inevitable) has arrived: when he must give the reply and do what is expected of him; play the semiologist, or at least the intellectual vaguely specialized in language. Hoping his terseness will be taken for profundity, he says: “Especially under a democratic regime.”

Still smiling, Mitterrand says, “Really?” It is hard to tell whether this is a request for elaboration, a polite agreement, or a discreet objection. The whipping boy, who is clearly responsible for this meeting, decides to intervene, out of fear, perhaps, that the conversation may die a premature death: “As Goebbels said, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver’…” Barthes does not have time to explain the significance of this quotation in its context before Mitterrand dryly corrects his underling: “No, that was Baldur von Schirach.” Embarrassed silence around the table. “You must excuse Monsieur Lang, who, although he was born before the war, is too young to remember it. Isn’t that right, ‘Jacques’?” Mitterrand narrows his eyes like a Japanese man. He pronounces “Jack” the French way. Why, at this instant, does Barthes have the impression that something is afoot between him and this little man with the piercing gaze? As if this lunch had been organized purely for him; as if the other guests were there only to allay suspicion, as if they were decoys or, worse, accomplices. And yet, this is not the first cultural lunch organized for Mitterrand: he has one every month. Surely, thinks Barthes, he didn’t have all the others just to provide an alibi.

Outside, what sounds like a horse-drawn carriage is heard passing along Rue des Blancs-Manteaux.

Barthes analyzes himself quickly: given the circumstances and the document folded in the inside pocket of his jacket, it’s only logical that he should be prone to surges of paranoia. He decides to speak again, partly to dilute the embarrassment of the young man with the curly brown hair, who’s still smiling, if somewhat contritely: “The great eras of rhetoric always correspond with republics: Athens, Rome, France … Socrates, Cicero, Robespierre … Different kinds of eloquence, admittedly, linked to different eras, but all unfolded like a tapestry over the canvas of democracy.” Mitterrand, who looks interested, objects: “Since our friend ‘Jacques’ decided to bring the war into our conversation, I ought to remind you that Hitler was a great orator.” And, he adds, without giving his listeners any sign of irony they might cling to: “De Gaulle, too. In his way.”

Resigned to playing along, Barthes asks: “And Giscard?”

As if he had been waiting for this all along, as if these preliminaries had no other purpose than to bring the conversation to exactly this point, Mitterrand leans back in his chair: “Giscard is a good technician. His strength is his precise knowledge of himself, of his strengths and weaknesses. He knows he is short of breath, but his phrasing is perfectly matched to the rhythm of his breathing. A subject, a verb, a direct complement. A period, no commas: because that would lead him into the unknown.” He pauses to give the obliging smiles time to spread across his guests’ faces, then goes on: “And there need not be any link between two sentences. Each is enough in itself, as smooth and full as an egg. One egg, two eggs, three eggs, a series of eggs, regular as a metronome.” Encouraged by the prudent chuckles offered from around the table, Mitterrand begins to warm up: “The well-oiled machine. I knew a musician once who claimed his metronome had more genius than Beethoven … Naturally, it’s a thrilling spectacle. And highly educational, into the bargain. Everyone understands that an egg is an egg, no?”

Eager to maintain his role as cultural mediator, Jack Lang intervenes: “That is exactly what Monsieur Barthes condemns in his work: the ravages of tautology.”

Barthes confirms: “Yes, well … let’s say the false demonstration par excellence, the useless equation: A equals A, ‘Racine is Racine.’ It’s zero degree thought.”

Though delighted by this convergence of theoretical viewpoints, Mitterrand is not sidetracked from the main flow of his speech: “Exactly! That’s exactly it. ‘Poland is Poland, France is France.’” He puts on a whiny voice: “Go on, then, explain the opposite! What I mean is that to a rare degree Giscard has the art of stating the obvious.”

Barthes, obligingly, concurs: “The obvious is not demonstrated. It demonstrates.”

Mitterrand repeats, triumphantly: “No, the obvious is not demonstrated.” Just then, a voice is heard at the other end of the table: “And yet if we follow your demonstration it seems obvious that victory cannot escape you. The French people are not that stupid. They won’t fall twice for that impostor’s tricks.”

The speaker is a young man with thinning hair and pouty lips, a bit like Giscard, who, unlike the other guests, does not seem impressed by the little man. Mitterrand turns spitefully toward him: “Oh, I know what you think, Laurent! Like most of our contemporaries, you think that he is the most dazzling performer of all.”

Laurent Fabius protests, with an expression of disdain: “I did not say that…”

Mitterrand, aggressively: “Oh yes you did! Oh yes you did! What a good television viewer you make! It’s because there are so many good television viewers like you that Giscard is so good on television.”

Fabius does not flinch. Mitterrand gets more and more worked up: “I acknowledge that he’s marvelous at explaining how nothing is ever his fault. Prices went up in September? It’s the beef, by Jove. [Barthes notes Mitterrand’s use of “by Jove.”] In October, it’s melons. In November, it’s gasoline, electricity, the railways, and rents. How could prices not go up? Brilliant.” His face is disfigured by a malicious grin. His voice grows husky: “And we are wonder-struck at being initiated so easily into the mysteries of the economy, at being allowed to follow this erudite guide into the minutiae of high finance.” He is shouting now: “Oh yes, oh yes, it’s the beef! Those damn melons! The treacherous railways! Long live Giscard!”

The guests are petrified, but Fabius, lighting a cigarette, replies: “A bit over the top.”

Mitterrand’s smile becomes charming again, his voice returns to normal, and, without anyone knowing whether he is replying to Fabius or attempting to reassure his other guests, he says: “I was joking, of course. Although, not entirely. But let’s be honest: it takes a high degree of intelligence to do such a good job convincing people that governing is about not being responsible for anything.”

Jack Lang slips away.

Barthes thinks that what he’s up against here is a very good specimen of the manic-obsessive: this man wants power, and in his adversary he has crystallized all the rancor he might feel for a destiny that has denied him power for too long. It’s as if he is already raging about his next defeat, and at the same time one senses he is ready to do anything except give up. Perhaps he doesn’t believe in his victory, but it is in his nature to fight for it nevertheless. Or maybe life made him like that. Defeat is undoubtedly the best teacher. Suddenly filled by a faint melancholy, Barthes lights a cigarette as a smokescreen. But defeat can also make a man get stuck in a rut. Barthes wonders what this little man really wants. His determination can’t be questioned, but isn’t he trapped in a system? 1965, 1974, 1978 … Each one a sort of glorious defeat, for which he personally is not blamed. So he feels empowered to persevere in his raison d’être, and his raison d’être, of course, is politics. But perhaps it is also defeat.

Fabius speaks up again: “Giscard is a brilliant orator, and you know it. Not only that, but his style is tailor-made for TV. That’s what it means to be modern.”

Mitterrand, faux-conciliatory: “But of course, my dear Laurent, I’ve been sure of that for quite some time. I was already an admirer of his presentational gifts when he used to speak at the National Assembly. Back then, I remarked that he was the best orator I’d heard since … Pierre Cot. Yes, a radical who was a minister during the Popular Front era. But I digress. Monsieur Fabius is so young, he barely remembers the Programme Commun, so as for the Popular Front … [Timid laughter around the table.] But, if you insist, let us return to Giscard, that beacon of eloquence! The clarity of his discourse, the fluency of his delivery, studded with pauses that made his listeners feel they were allowed to think, like slow-motion replays on televised sport, even the way he holds his head … it all readied Giscard for invading our television screens. No doubt he put in a great deal of graft to supplement his natural abilities. The age of the amateur is over! But he got his reward. He makes the television breathe.”

Fabius is still unimpressed. “Well, it seems to work rather well. People listen to him, and there are even some who vote for him.”

Mitterrand replies, as if to himself: “I wonder, though. You talk about a modern style. I think he’s old-fashioned. Heartfelt, literary rhetoric is mocked these days. [Barthes hears the echo of the 1974 debate, still an open wound after his defeat.] And rightly so, more often than not. [Oh, how this admission must have pained him! Oh, how hard Mitterrand must have worked on his self-control to reach this point!] The affectations of language offend the ear like makeup offends the eye.”

Fabius waits, Barthes waits, everyone waits. Mitterrand is used to people waiting for him; he takes his time before continuing: “But not just rhetoric—rhetoric and a half. The rhetoric of the technocrat is already worn out. Yesterday it was precious. Now it’s ridiculous. Who said recently: ‘I am suffering with my balance of payments’?”

Jack Lang comes back to sit down, and asks: “Wasn’t it Rocard?”

Mitterrand lets his irritation show again: “No, it was Giscard.” He glares at the bespectacled young man who ruined his punch line, then goes on regardless: “One wants to palpate him like a doctor. Suffering with a headache? Suffering with heartburn, backache, stomachache? Everyone knows how those things feel. But suffering with his balance of payments? Where is that, between the sixth and seventh ribs? Some unknown gland? One of those little bones in the coccyx? Giscard isn’t over the line yet.”

The guests no longer know if they should laugh or not. In doubt, they hold off.

Mitterrand goes on, staring out the window: “He has common sense and he’s a reasonable technician. He knows and feels politics like no one else.”

Barthes understands the compliment’s ambiguity: for someone like Mitterrand, it is obviously the highest praise, but—via a schizophrenia inherent in politics, making use of a very rich polysemy—the term “politics” also suggests something disparaging, even insulting, in his mouth.

Mitterrand is unstoppable now: “But his generation is being wiped out along with economism. Margot, who dried his eyes, is starting to get bored.”

Barthes wonders if Mitterrand might be drunk.

Fabius, who seems increasingly amused, tells his boss: “Watch out. He’s still moving, and he knows how to aim straight. Remember his jibe: ‘You do not have a monopoly on the heart.’”

The guests stop breathing.

Unexpectedly, Mitterrand’s response is almost composed: “And I don’t claim to! My opinions concern the public man. I reserve judgment on the private man, whom I don’t know.” Having made this necessary concession and thus demonstrated his spirit of fair play, he is able to conclude: “But we were talking about technique, weren’t we? And it has become so important to him that he is no longer capable of the unexpected. The difficult moment in life—his, yours, mine, the life of anyone ambitious—is when you see the writing on the wall telling you that you are starting to repeat yourself.”

Hearing this, Barthes plunges his nose into his glass. He feels nervous laughter welling up inside him, but he contains it by reciting this saying to himself: “Every man laughs for himself.”

Reflexivity. Always reflexivity.