Giscard, off screen: “Not at all.”
Mitterrand, not looking at him: “If he didn’t mean that, then his speech was pointless.”
Simon is troubled. He grabs a beer from the coffee table, wedges it under his armpit, and tries to remove the cap, but the bottle slips out and falls onto the floor. Bayard waits for Simon to explode with rage because he knows how much his friend hates it when daily life reminds him that he is disabled, so he wipes up the beer that has spilled onto the floorboards and is quick to say: “No big deal!”
But Simon looks strangely perplexed. He points to Mitterrand and says: “Look at him. Notice anything?”
“What?”
“Have you listened to him since the beginning? Don’t you think he’s been good?”
“Well, yeah, he’s better than he was seven years ago, that’s for sure.”
“No, it’s more than that. He’s abnormally good.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s subtle, but since the end of the first half hour, he’s been maneuvering Giscard, and I can’t work out how he’s doing it. It’s like an invisible strategy: I can sense it, but I can’t understand it.”
“You’re not saying…”
“Watch.”
Bayard watches as Giscard busts a gut to show that the Socialists are irresponsible fools who must not under any circumstances be trusted with military hardware and the nuclear deterrent: “When it comes to defense, on the contrary … you have never voted with the government on defense, and you have voted against every bill relating to defense. Those bills were presented outside of the budgetary discussion and so it would be perfectly imaginable that either your party or your … or you yourself, aware of the very high stakes of national security, would make a nonpartisan vote on military bills. I note that you did not vote for any of the three military bills … notably that of January 24, 1963…”
Mitterrand doesn’t even bother responding and Michèle Cotta moves on to another subject, so an irritated Giscard insists: “This is very important!” Michèle Cotta protests politely: “Absolutely! Of course, Monsieur President!” And she moves on to African politics. Boissonat is visibly thinking about something else. No one cares. No one is listening to him anymore. It looks as if Mitterrand has completely demolished him.
Bayard begins to understand.
Giscard continues to sink.
Simon spells out his conclusion: “Mitterrand has the seventh function of language.”
Bayard tries to assemble the pieces of the puzzle while Mitterrand and Giscard debate French military intervention in Zaire.
“But, Simon, we saw in Venice that the function didn’t work.”
Mitterrand gives Giscard the coup de grace on the Kolwezi affair: “So basically, you could have repatriated them earlier … if you’d thought about it.”
Simon points at the TV set:
“That works!”
95
It is raining in Paris, the celebrations have begun at the Bastille, but the Socialist leaders are still at party headquarters, in Rue de Solférino, where an electric joy courses through the ranks of activists. Victory is always an achievement in politics, an end as well as a beginning; that is why the excitement it causes is a mix of euphoria and vertigo. What’s more, the alcohol is flowing freely and, already, the canapés are piling up. “What a night!” says Mitterrand.
Jack Lang shakes hands, kisses cheeks, hugs everyone who crosses his path. He smiles at Fabius, who cried like a baby when the results were announced. In the street, people are singing and shouting in the rain. It is a waking dream and a historic moment. On a personal level, he knows that he will be minister of culture. Moati waves his arms around like a conductor. Badinter and Debray dance a sort of minuet. Jospin and Quilès drink to the memory of Jean Jaurès. Young men and women climb on the railings in Rue de Solférino. Camera flashes crackle like thousands of little lightning streaks in the great storm of history. Lang doesn’t know which way to turn anymore. Someone hails him: “Monsieur Lang!”
He turns around and sees Bayard and Simon.
Lang is surprised. He immediately realizes that these two have not come to join the celebrations.
Bayard speaks first: “Would you mind giving us a few moments of your time?” He presents his card. Lang registers the red, white, and blue stripes.
“What’s this about?”
“It’s about Roland Barthes.”
The sound of the dead critic’s name is like an invisible hand slapping Lang in the face.
“Uh, listen … Not really, I don’t think this is the right time. Later in the week, perhaps? Just see my secretary and she can make an appointment for you. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
But Bayard holds him back by the arm: “I insist.”
Pierre Joxe, who is passing, asks: “Is there a problem, Jack?”
Lang looks over at the policemen guarding the gates. Until tonight, the police have been in the service of their opponents, but now he is in a position to ask them to escort these two gentlemen outside.
In the street, the crowd is chanting “The Internationale,” punctuated by a chorus of car horns.
Simon rolls up the right sleeve of his jacket and says: “Please. It won’t take long.”
Lang stares at the stump. Joxe says to him: “Jack?”
“Everything’s fine, Pierre. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He finds an unoccupied ground-floor office, just off the entrance hall. The light switch doesn’t work, but the glow of the streetlamps comes through the window, so the three men remain in this gloom. None has any desire to sit down.
Simon takes over: “Monsieur Lang, how did you come into possession of the seventh function?”
Lang sighs. Simon and Bayard wait. Mitterrand is president. Lang can tell them now. And in all probability, Simon thinks, Lang wants to tell them.
He organized a lunch with Barthes because he knew that Barthes was in possession of Jakobson’s manuscript.
“How?” asks Simon.
“How what?” says Lang. “How did Barthes come into possession of the manuscript or how did I know that he had?”
Simon is calm, but he knows that Bayard often has a hard time containing his impatience. As he doesn’t want his policeman friend to threaten to gouge out Jack Lang’s eyeballs with a coffee spoon, he says softly: “Both.”
Jack Lang does not know how Barthes came into possession of the manuscript, but in any case his extraordinary network of contacts in cultural circles enabled Lang to become aware of this fact. It was Debray, after talking about it with Derrida, who convinced him of the document’s importance. So they decided to organize the lunch with Barthes in order to steal it from him. During the meal, Lang discreetly pilfered the sheet of paper that was in Barthes’s jacket pocket and gave it to Debray, who was waiting, hidden, in the entrance hall. Debray ran off to hand the document to Derrida, who fabricated a false function based on the original text, which Debray took back to Lang, who slipped it into Barthes’s pocket before lunch was over. The timing of the operation was extremely precise; Derrida had to write the false function in record time, based on the real one, so that it would be credible but would not actually work.
Simon is amazed: “But what was the point? Barthes knew the text. He would have realized straight away.”
Lang explains: “We banked on the assumption that if we were aware of the existence of this document, we weren’t the only ones, and that it would be bound to arouse keen interest.”
Bayard interrupts him: “You anticipated that Sollers and Kristeva would steal it from him?”