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.”