The Seventh Function of Language

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.