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.
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.
Bayard tears him from his reverie by dropping a stack of magazines on the desk. He found them under the bed. They are not back issues of the Nouvel Obs. With a snarl of satisfaction, he says to Simon: “He liked cock, this intellectual!” Spread out before him, Simon Herzog sees magazine covers featuring young, muscular naked men, posing and staring out insolently at him. I’m not sure how widely known Barthes’s homosexuality was at the time. When he wrote his bestseller, A Lover’s Discourse, he took care never to characterize his love object in terms of gender, striving to use neutral formulations such as “the partner” or “the other” (both of which, for what it’s worth, are masculine words in French, meaning that the pronoun is always “he”). Unlike Foucault, whose homosexuality was very open, almost as a form of protest, I know that Barthes was very discreet, perhaps ashamed, in any case very preoccupied with keeping up appearances, until his mother’s death at least. Foucault wanted him to be more open, and despised him a little for his reserve, I think. But I don’t know if there were rumors in university circles or among the wider public, or whether everyone knew. Anyway, if Simon Herzog was aware of Barthes’s homosexuality, he hadn’t thought it necessary to inform Superintendent Bayard at this stage of the inquiry.
Just as the sniggering policeman is opening the centerfold of a magazine named Gai Pied, the telephone rings. Bayard stops. He puts the magazine on the desk without bothering to close it, and freezes. He looks at Simon Herzog, who looks back at him, while the handsome youth in the photograph grips his cock and looks out at both of them and the telephone continues to ring. Bayard lets it ring a few more times and picks up the receiver without a word. Simon watches as he remains silent for several seconds. He also hears the silence on the other end of the line and instinctively stops breathing. When Bayard finally says “Hello” there is an audible click, followed by the “beep-beep” that indicates the call has been ended. Bayard hangs up, puzzled. Simon Herzog asks stupidly: “Wrong number?” In the street, through the open window, they hear a car engine start. Bayard takes the porn magazines and the two men leave the room. Simon Herzog thinks: “I should have closed the window. It’s going to rain.” Jacques Bayard thinks: “Fucking queer intellectual bastards…”