After announcing the death of the author, Barthes stressed the reader’s need for the author’s “figure”. This article aims at grasping the effects of such a paradox, by exploring the images of the self projected by Travels in China and Mourning Diary on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the tributes from close friends who mean to reveal what kind of man the author really was. We must grasp the ways in which an image of the self, whether spontaneous or elaborated by close relatives, forms, as verbal elaborations which contribute to mythologizing an image of the intellectual from the 1970s-1980s we want to know everything about.