The book in question, about whose reception he seemed more than usually fretful, was La Chambre claire (translated as Camera Lucida): a "note on photography", as the French subtitle has it, which in retrospect looks calculated to affront. Two days before the accident, his former student Julia Kristeva had spoken to him by phone and had been perplexed by an awkward turn of phrase that she put down to his depression. The following day his publisher, Éditions du Seuil, announced that the 64-year-old writer's condition was stable and there was no cause for concern.īarthes had spent the previous two months correcting proofs, then sending out signed copies, of his latest book – which would turn out to be his last – and subsequently slumping into something close to despair as hostile reviews began to appear in the press. Unconscious and bleeding from the nose, he was taken to the Salpêtrière hospital, where it took several hours to establish his identity. It may well have been exasperation or boredom (for he was often bored) that made him decide, when the lunch concluded, to clear his head and walk home alone to his apartment on the rue Servandoni.Īt about 3.45pm, witnesses recalled, Barthes paused before crossing the street at 44 rue des Écoles he looked left and right, but failed to spot an advancing laundry van, which knocked him down.
Barthes, however, had wavered before giving in to yet another interruption of his working routine.
As he rallied support for his presidential campaign of the following year, the leader of the Socialist party was in the habit of entertaining Parisian writers and intellectuals at relatively informal gatherings political cajolery aside, it was said that Mitterrand simply liked to be apprised of new ideas in art and culture. O n Monday 25 February 1980, at the invitation of the future French culture minister Jack Lang, Roland Barthes attended a lunch hosted by François Mitterrand.
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