The Seventh Function of Language

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.