He does not feel the hand delicately turning the valve of the ventilator.
But La Rochefoucauld … him, yes. After all, Barthes owes a great deal to Maximes. He was a semiologist before his time, in that he knew how to decode the human soul through the signs of our behavior … The greatest master in French literature, no less … Barthes sees the Prince of Marcillac riding proudly beside the Grand Condé in the ditches of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, under fire from Turenne’s troops, thinking, my word, what a beautiful day for dying …
What’s happening? He can’t breathe anymore. His throat has suddenly shrunk.
But the Grande Mademoiselle will open the city gates to let the Condé’s troops in, and La Rochefoucauld, wounded in the eyes, temporarily blind, will not die, not this time, and will recover …
He opens his eyes. And he sees her, haloed by blinding light, like a representation of the Virgin Mary. He is suffocating. He tries to call for help, but no sound emerges from his mouth.
He’ll recover, won’t he? Won’t he?
She smiles sweetly at him and presses his head against the pillow to prevent him from sitting up. Not that he has enough strength, anyway. This time it’s for good, he knows it. He would like to surrender but his body goes into convulsions. His body wants to live. His frightened brain craves the oxygen that is no longer entering his bloodstream. Spurred by a final burst of adrenaline, his heart races, then slows down again.
“Always to love, to suffer, to expire.” In the end, his final thought is a line of verse from Corneille.
24
The television news, March 26, 1980, 8:00 p.m., presented by Patrick Poivre d’Arvor:
“Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. A great deal of news that … [PPDA pauses for a second] affects our day-to-day lives. So, some of it is good, some less so. I’ll let you decide which is which.” (From his apartment, next to Place Clichy, Deleuze, who never misses the evening news, replies from the comfort of his armchair: “Thank you!”)
8:01 p.m.: “First of all, the rise in the cost of living for the month of February: 1.1 percent. ‘It’s not a very good sign,’ said René Monory, the minister for the economy—although it is better [it would have been difficult to be worse, says PPDA, and, in front of his TV set, on Rue de Bièvre, Mitterrand thinks the same thing] than the figure for January: 1.9 percent. Also better than the corresponding figures for the United States and Great Britain and … the same as West Germany’s.” (At the mention of their German rivals, Giscard, who is signing documents at his desk in the élysée, chuckles mechanically without looking up. In his attic room, Hamed is getting ready to go out, but can’t find his second sock.)
8:09 p.m.: “There are strikes, too, in schools. Tomorrow, the teachers’ union is calling on its members in Paris and the Essonne to protest against planned class closures for the next academic year.” (Holding a Chinese beer in one hand, his cigarette holder in the other, Sollers curses from his sofa: “A nation of bureaucrats!” From the kitchen, Kristeva replies: “I’m making sauté de veau.”)
8:10 p.m.: “Finally, some news that will come as a ‘breath of fresh air,’ so to speak [Simon rolls his eyes]: the significant reduction in atmospheric pollution in France over the last seven years. Sulfur emissions down thirty percent, according to Michel d’Ornano, the environment minister, and carbon dioxide down forty-six percent.” (Mitterrand tries to put on a grimace of disgust, but in fact this doesn’t alter his usual expression.)
8:11 p.m.: “So, foreign news … Today, in Chad … Afghanistan … Colombia…” (Various countries are mentioned but no one listens, except Foucault. Hamed finds his sock.)
8:12 p.m.: “A rather surprising victory for Edward Kennedy in the New York State primaries…” (Deleuze picks up his telephone to call Félix Guattari. At home, Bayard irons his shirt in front of the television.)
8:13 p.m.: “The number of road accidents rose last year, the Gendarmerie Nationale informs us: 12,480 deaths and 250,000 accidents in 1979 … that’s equal to the entire population of a town like Salon-de-Provence dying in these accidents. [Hamed wonders why the newsreader chose Salon-de-Provence.] Figures that give us food for thought, with the Easter holidays approaching…” (Sollers lifts a finger and exclaims: “Food for thought! Food for thought, Julia, do you hear?… Isn’t that marvelous?… Figures that give us food for thought, ha!” Kristeva replies: “Dinner’s ready!”)
8:15 p.m.: “A road accident that could have had very serious consequences: yesterday, a truck transporting radioactive materials collided with another truck before crashing into a ditch. But thanks to the safety systems, there has not been a radioactive leak.” (Mitterrand, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, Simon, Lacan, all laugh loudly in front of their respective TV sets. Bayard lights a cigarette while continuing to iron shirts.)
8:23 p.m.: “And the interview with Fran?ois Mitterrand in La Croix, with these little phrases that will go down in history [Mitterrand smiles with pleasure]: ‘Giscard remains the man bound to a clan, a class, and a caste. Six years of stagnation, belly-dancing in front of the Golden Calf. And pshit, said Ubu.’” (“That is Fran?ois Mitterrand saying that,” PPDA makes clear. Giscard rolls his eyes.) “So that is what he said about the president. About Georges Marchais and his gang of three, well … ‘When he wants to be,’ says Fran?ois Mitterrand again, ‘Marchais is a world-class comic.’ [In his apartment on Rue d’Ulm, Althusser shrugs. He shouts to his wife, in the kitchen: “Did you hear that, Hélène?” No response.] Finally, Fran?ois Mitterrand, in response to a question about a possible Mitterrand-Rocard ticket for the Socialist Party, he pimply … [PPDA gets his words muddled, but continues impassively] simply replied that this American expression had no French equivalent in our institutions.”
8:24 p.m.: “Roland Barthes … [PPDA pauses] died this afternoon in the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris. [Giscard stops signing documents, Mitterrand stops grimacing, Sollers stops rummaging around in his underpants with his cigarette holder, Kristeva stops stirring her sautéed veal and runs out of the kitchen, Hamed stops putting on his sock, Althusser stops trying to not yell at his wife, Bayard stops ironing his shirts, Deleuze says to Guattari: “I’ll call you back!,” Foucault stops thinking about biopower, Lacan continues smoking his cigar.] The writer and philosopher was the victim of a traffic accident last month. He was [PPDA pauses] sixty-four years old. He was famous for his work on modern writing and communication. Bernard Pivot interviewed him for Apostrophes: Roland Barthes was presenting his book A Lover’s Discourse, a book that was extremely successful [Foucault rolls his eyes], and in the clip we are going to see now, he explained from a sociological point of view [Simon rolls his eyes] the relationships between sentimentality … [PPDA pauses] and sexuality. [Foucault rolls his eyes.] We’ll listen to that now.” (Lacan rolls his eyes.)
Roland Barthes (in his Philippe Noiret voice): “I maintain that a subject—and I say a subject in order not to specify the, er, sex of the subject, if you see what I mean—but a subject who is in love would have, uh, a lot more difficulty over … overcoming the sort of taboo about sentimentality, whereas the taboo about sexuality is, today, transgressed very easily.”