Bayard tries to remember who Hannibal is and notes mechanically that the little finger on the waiter’s left hand is missing a phalanx. He interrupts the waiter’s speech to order another beer, opens the René Pommier book, counts the word nonsense seventeen times in four pages, and closes it again. In the meantime, the waiter has begun opining on another subject: “No civilized society can get by without the death penalty!” Bayard pays and exits the café, leaving his change on the table.
He passes the statue of Montaigne without seeing it, crosses Rue des écoles and enters the Sorbonne. Superintendent Bayard understands that he understands nothing, or at least not much, about all this rubbish. What he needs is someone to explain it to him: a specialist, a translator, a transmitter, a tutor. A professor, basically. At the Sorbonne, he asks where he can find the semiology department. The person at reception sharply replies that there isn’t one. In the courtyard outside, he approaches some students in navy-blue sailor coats and boat shoes to ask where he should go to attend a semiology course. Most of them have no idea what it is or have only vaguely heard of it. But, at last, a long-haired young man smoking a joint beneath the statue of Louis Pasteur tells him that for “semio” he has to go to Vincennes. Bayard is no expert when it comes to academia, but he knows that Vincennes is a university swarming with work-shy lefties and professional agitators. Out of curiosity, he asks this young man why he isn’t there. The man is wearing a large turtleneck sweater, a pair of black trousers with the legs rolled up as though he’s about to go mussel fishing, and purple Dr. Martens. He takes a drag on his joint and replies: “I was there until my second second year. But I was part of a Trotskyite group.” This explanation seems to strike him as sufficient, but when he sees from Bayard’s inquiring look that it isn’t, he adds: “Well, there were, uh, a few problems.”
Bayard does not press the matter. He gets back in his 504 and drives to Vincennes. At a red light, he sees a black DS and thinks: “Now, that was a car!”
9
The 504 joins the ring road at Porte de Bercy, gets off at Porte de Vincennes, goes back up the very long Avenue de Paris, passes the military hospital, refuses to yield to a brand-new blue Fuego driven by some Japanese men, skirts around the chateau, passes the Parc Floral, enters the woods, and parks outside some shack-like buildings that resemble a giant 1970s suburban high school: just about humanity’s worst effort in architectural terms. Bayard, who remembers his distant years spent studying law in the grandeur of Assas, finds this place utterly disorienting: to reach the classrooms, he has to cross a sort of souk run by Africans, step over comatose junkies sprawled on the ground, pass a waterless pond filled with junk, pass crumbling walls covered with posters and graffiti, where he can read: “Professors, students, education officers, ATOS staff: die, bitches!”; “No to closing the food souk”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Nogent”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Marne-la-Vallée”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Savigny-sur-Orge”; “No to moving from Vincennes to Saint-Denis”; “Long live the proletarian revolution”; “Long live the Iranian revolution”; “Maoists = fascists”; “Trotskyites = Stalinists”; “Lacan = cop”; “Badiou = Nazi”; “Althusser = murderer”; “Deleuze = fuck your mother”; “Cixous = fuck me”; “Foucault = Khomeini’s whore”; “Barthes = pro-Chinese social traitor”; “Callicles = SS”; “It is forbidden to forbid forbidding”; “Union de la Gauche = up your ass”; “Come to my place, we’ll read Capital! signed: Balibar” … Students stinking of marijuana accost him aggressively, thrusting thick pamphlets at him: “Comrade, do you know what’s going on in Chile? In El Salvador? Are you concerned about Argentina? And Mozambique? What, you don’t care about Mozambique? Do you know where it is? You want me to tell you about Timor? If not, we’re having a collection for a literacy drive in Nicaragua. Can you buy me a coffee?” Here, he feels less at sea. Back when he was a member of Jeune Nation, he used to beat the crap out of filthy little lefties like these. He throws the tracts in the dried-out pond that serves as a trash can.
Without really knowing how he got there, Bayard ends up at the Culture and Communications department. He scans the list of “course units” displayed on a board in the corridor and finally finds roughly what he came for: Semiology of the Image, a classroom number, a weekly timetable, and the name of a professor—Simon Herzog.
10