But the trapdoor to the apartment below is open.
Bayard screams at his men to get downstairs but by the time they have turned around, their prey is already on the stairs and they bump into Barthes’s brother, Michel, coming out of his apartment in a panic because an intruder just came through the hole in his ceiling. So the Vinci technician is now two floors below them, and on the ground floor, of course, Simon, who has no idea what is going on, is shoved out of the way by the man, who sprints out of the building at top speed, and when he slams the double doors shut behind him, the mechanism that he himself installed is triggered, locking them inside.
Bayard rushes into the concierge’s office and grabs the telephone. He wants to call for backup, but it’s a rotary phone and the time it takes him to compose the number feels enough for the man to have reached Porte d’Orléans, or maybe even the city of Orléans.
But the man is not going in that direction. He wants to escape by car, but two policemen left on guard outside prevent him from picking up his vehicle, parked at the end of the street, so he runs toward the Jardin du Luxembourg while behind him the two officers shout their first warnings. Through the double doors, Bayard shouts, “Don’t shoot!” He wants the man alive, of course. When his men finally manage to free the mechanism, by pressing on the button embedded in the wall, the guy has disappeared but Bayard has sounded the alert. He knows that the area is being sealed off and the man won’t get far.
The man runs through the Jardin du Luxembourg and he can hear the policemen blowing their whistles behind him, but the passersby, used to joggers and the park guards’ whistles, pay no notice until he finds himself face-to-face with a cop. The cop tries to tackle him, but the man runs smack into him, like a rugby player, knocks him down, steps over him, and continues running. Where is he going? Does he know? He changes direction. One thing is sure: he has to get out of the park before all the exits are blocked.
Bayard is now in the van, giving orders by radio. Police officers have fanned out around the Latin Quarter. The fugitive is surrounded. He’s screwed.
But this man is resourceful. He hurtles down Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a narrow one-way street, which prevents any cars from following him. For some reason known only to him, he must cross over to the Right Bank. Coming out of Rue Bonaparte, he runs onto the Pont-Neuf, but that is where his race ends, because at the other end of the bridge, police vans block the way, and when he turns around he sees Bayard’s van cutting off his retreat. He’s trapped like a rat. Even if he jumps in the river, he won’t get far, but maybe he has one last card to play, he thinks.
He climbs onto the parapet and holds out a piece of paper he has taken from his jacket. Bayard approaches him, alone. The man says one step farther and he’ll throw the paper in the Seine. Bayard stops dead, as if he’s just walked into an invisible wall. “Calm down.”
“Don’t come any nearrrer!”
“What do you want?”
“A car with a full tank of gas. If not, I thrrrow the document in the rrriver.”
“Go ahead, throw it in.”
The man’s arm twitches. Bayard shivers, in spite of himself. “Wait!” He knows that this scrap of paper might solve the mystery of at least four deaths. “Let’s talk, okay? What’s your name?” Simon has joined him. At both ends of the bridge, the police have the man in their sights. Out of breath, chest wheezing from the effort, he moves his other hand to his pocket. At that precise instant, there is the sound of a gunshot. The man swivels. Bayard yells: “Don’t shoot!” The man drops like a stone, but the paper flutters around above the river, and Bayard and Simon, who have rushed to the stone balustrade, lean over to watch the graceful curves of its erratic descent as if hypnotized. At last, it lands delicately on the water. And floats. Bayard, Simon, and the policemen who have instinctively understood that this document was their real objective, all stare, petrified, breath held, as the sheet of paper drifts along with the current.
Then Bayard tears himself from this contemplative torpor and, deciding that all hope is not yet lost, yanks off his jacket, his shirt, and his trousers, steps over the parapet, hesitates for a few seconds. And jumps. Disappears in a huge splash.
When he resurfaces, he is about sixty feet from the paper and, from up on the bridge, Simon and the policemen start shouting at him, all at the same time, indicating which direction to take, like supporters at a football match. Bayard starts swimming, as hard as he can. He tries to get closer, but the paper is carried away by the current. Still, the gap is gradually reduced. He’s close now, he’s going to catch it, only another ten feet, and then they disappear under the bridge and Simon and the policemen run to the other side and wait for them to reappear, and when they reappear the shouting starts up again. Three more feet and he’ll have it, but at that moment a riverboat passes, creating little waves that submerge the paper just as Bayard is about to reach out and grab it. The paper sinks, so Bayard dives after it, and for a few seconds all they can see is the pair of underpants he’s wearing, poking up out of the water. When he resurfaces, he is clutching the soaked paper in his hand and he swims doggedly over to the bank amid cheers and hurrahs.
But when he hauls himself onto the grass, he opens his hand and realizes that the sheet of paper is now merely a shapeless paste and that the writing has been dissolved because Barthes wrote with a fountain pen. This isn’t CSI and there will not be any way of making the text reappear: no magic scanner, no ultraviolet light. The document is lost forever.
The officer who fired the shot comes over to explain: he saw the man reaching for a gun in his pocket and he didn’t have time to think, so he fired. Bayard notes that the cop has a finger missing on his left hand. He asks him what happened. The policeman replies he had an accident while he was chopping wood at his parents’ house in the countryside.
When the police divers fish the corpse out of the water, they will find in his jacket pocket not a firearm but Barthes’s copy of Essays in General Linguistics, and Bayard, still drying himself, will ask Simon: “For fuck’s sake, who is this Jakobson guy?” And so, at last, Simon will be able to finish his lecture.
32
Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist, born at the end of the nineteenth century, who was at the inception of a movement named Structuralism. After Saussure (1857–1913) and Peirce (1839–1914), and along with Hjelmslev (1899–1965), he is probably the most important theoretician among the founders of linguistics.
Beginning with two stylistic devices taken from ancient rhetoric, namely the metaphor (replacing one word with another linked to it by some sort of resemblance, “raging bull” for the boxer Jake LaMotta, for example) and metonymy (replacing one word with another linked to it by contiguity: “having a glass” to say that one drinks the liquid in the glass—the container for the contents, for example), he succeeded in explaining the functioning of language according to two axes: the paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis.
Broadly speaking, the paradigmatic axis is vertical and concerns the choice of vocabulary: each time you pronounce a word, you choose it from a list that you have in mind and which you mentally scroll through. For example, “goat,” “economy,” “death,” “trousers,” “I-you-he,” or whatever.