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IT IS 1 JUNE 2015 and I am standing outside no 11 rue Servandoni in Paris’s sixth arrondissement I have lived in this city, on and off, for over ten years I’ve walked in and through the Jardin de Luxembourg many times, likewise the loop around Place Saint-Sulpice (I can see now how the rue Servandoni serves as a corridor between the two) But it so happens, I realise, that I’ve never walked down this particular street before Now that I’m here, I’m wondering why it has never, not once, occurred to me to seek this building out: the building where Roland Barthes lived for twenty years, from 1960 to 1980, in an apartment on the sixth floor   I’m standing outside no 11, the street is empty, the sun is warm and I’m trying hard to feel something of the curiosity – what Barthes would call a biographical curiosity, of the kind that would unexpectedly fire him up late in life – that might have prompted me to do so   I try imagining a body For instance, leaning some of its weight against one of the heavy double doors, pushing it open, stepping inside and climbing the stairs marked B   Or a forefinger punching out the building code: once, twice, several times a day, over the space of twenty years   But the thing is: I’m finding it difficult Much easier to summon are the characters that Alexandre Dumas has live next door Here is D’Artagnan, the new Musketeer, defending Constance with clashing swords; here are the two of them creeping along this very street at dusk; here are the neighbours who close their shutters and all go to bed early   It’s not that I am uncurious about the life Barthes lived upstairs I know that’s not it, because, really, I’m fascinated   It’s more that what I am most urgently interested in – what I came here today, hot and self-conscious on the bus, especially to consider – is my own pavement position   It is 1 December 1976 and Barthes is looking out of the window He sees a woman walking with her child on the street