The Seventh Function of Language

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