At the end of his life, Barthes decides to address a very prestigious and intimidating topic : love. For two years he devoted a seminar on it in Paris and published a successful book A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments (1977). Barthes’ extensive notes for his course were published in 2007. What light does this intensive work bring to the understanding of that feeling, after it has been studied over the centuries in a massive number of theories? When we compare the richness of the seminar to the final product as a book, we can see a substantial impoverishment and even significant distortions of the analyzed concept. This article attempts to bring out a few examples of figures that the scholar developed in the seminar, but ultimately rejected or modified in the Fragments. What do the fundamental choices he made to craft his final lover’s discourse reveal? What difficulties did he encounter? What conception of love emerges from the process and how does it fit into his global intellectual profile? These are the questions that this critical study sets out to answer.