The students laughed at this. “Very good, Bertie-Pierre,” said Sylvie. “So, tell me, who do you read at your university?”
Bertie shifted his feet uncomfortably, even though they did not quite reach the floor. “I’m still at school,” he said meekly.
“I’m not at university yet.”
The students pretended surprise at this revelation. “But there you are knowing all about Melanie Klein and still at school!”
said Marie-Louise. “Remarkable. Perhaps this is the new Scottish Enlightenment.”
Bertie let the remark pass. Jean-Philippe, he noticed, was looking at him with interest. “Tell me, Bertie-Pierre,” the student said. “Who are your friends at school?”
“There is a boy called Tofu,” Bertie replied. “He’s my friend.
Sometimes.”
“And tell us about this Tofu,” asked Sylvie. “Would we like him?”
“I don’t think so,” said Bertie.
“Ah!” said Jean-Philippe. “And are there other friends?”
Bertie thought for a moment. “There’s Olive,” he said. “She’s a girl.”
“Well, perhaps we would like this Olive,” said Sylvie.
“No,” said Bertie. “I don’t think you would.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Jean-Philippe looked at his watch. “Well, Bertie-Pierre, time is marching on. We were all going to a lecture this afternoon. Jean-Francois Francois, the well-known deconstructionist, is talking at three. Everybody is going to be there. Would you like to join us?”
Bertie did not hesitate to accept the invitation. He had never heard of Jean-Francois Francois, nor of deconstruction, but he thought that it would be fun to listen to a lecture with his three friends.
“Time to pay,” said Sylvie, signalling to Henri.
Henri brought the bill over to the table and presented it to Jean-Philippe. He glanced at it quickly and then slipped it over the table to Marie-Louise, who shook her head in disbelief.
296
“Please let me pay,” said Bertie. “I have lots of money.”
“But Bertie-Pierre,” protested Sylvie. “You are our guest!”
“On the other hand,” said Jean-Philippe, “it’s very generous of you, Bertie-Pierre. And perhaps we should accept.”
Bertie extracted a wad of banknotes from his pocket and passed them to Henri. Then, collecting their belongings, he and his friends left the restaurant and made the short journey on foot to the lecture theatre in the Sorbonne where Jean-Francois Francois was due to speak.
There was a good crowd already waiting there. Bertie sat near the back row with his friends and watched the scene as the theatre filled up. There was a great deal of conversation going on between members of the audience, but this died down when a door at the side opened and Jean-Francois Francois entered the room. There was applause as he made his way up to the podium, but when he reached it he quickly spat out some words into the microphone and the applause died down.
“What’s he saying?” Bertie whispered to Jean-Philippe. “I haven’t learned French yet.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jean-Philippe. “I’ll translate for you. He just said that applause is infantile. He says that only the bourgeoisie claps. That’s why everybody has stopped clapping.”
Bertie thought about this. What was wrong with clapping, particularly if somebody said something you agreed with? They had been clapped at their concert; was that because the bourgeoisie had been present?
Jean-Francois Francois now burst into a torrent of French, pointing a thin, nicotine-stained finger into the crowd for emphasis. Bertie listened enthralled. It seemed to him that whatever the lecturer was saying must be very important, as the audience was hanging onto every word.
“What’s he saying now?” he whispered to Jean-Philippe.
“He says that the rules of science are not rules at all,” Jean-Philippe whispered back. “He says that the hegemony of scientific knowledge is the creation of an imposed consensus. The social basis of that consensus is artificial and illusory. He says that even the rules of physics are a socially determined imposition.
There is no scientific truth. That’s more or less what he says.”
Bertie was astonished. He did not know many rules of physics, but he did know Bernoulli’s principle which explained how lift occurred. And surely that was true, because he had seen it in operation on the flight from Edinburgh to Paris.
Bertie turned to Jean-Phillipe and said: “But would Mr Francois say that Bernoulli’s principle was rubbish when he was in a plane, up in the air?”
Jean-Philippe listened to Bertie’s remark and frowned. Then the frown disappeared and he turned and passed the observation on to Sylvie, who listened with a slowly dawning smile and passed it on to the person next to her. Soon the remark was travelling across the lecture theatre in every direction and people could be heard muttering and giggling. Then a young man at the front of the lecture theatre stood up and shouted out a question, interrupting the lecturer’s flow. Bertie could not understand what it was about but he did hear reference to Bernoulli.
Jean-Francois Francois hesitated. He pointed a finger into the crowd and began to speak. But he was now shouted down.
