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.