Paris is a recurring point of departure, memory, and projected change in Antoine Roquentin’s life. It first appears in the account of Jean-Paul Sartre’s background as the author’s birthplace, but within the novel’s emotional geography it matters chiefly as a place Roquentin has left behind and, at the end, elects to make his next home. The city promises movement without guaranteeing renewal: his decision to go there arrives alongside an acute awareness that a change of address cannot by itself supply a reason to act.

Background and Narrative Position

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. The biographical account also connects his later teaching at Le Havre to the creation of Bouville, the model for the setting of Nausea. Paris therefore stands outside the novel’s principal provincial setting as both a fact in the author’s biography and a counterpoint to the town where Roquentin’s present life unfolds.

The novel does not develop Paris as a fully depicted urban setting in this evidence. Instead, it enters through references to past departures, remembered correspondence, and a future journey. That restricted presence gives the city a particular narrative function: Paris is less a scene in which the novel’s central action takes place than a destination around which Roquentin’s expectations and anxieties gather.

Departure, Memory, and Return

One recollection places Roquentin on the Avenue du Maine, buying chestnuts at the corner of the Rue de la Gaite. He laughs to himself as he imagines the face of Nerciat returning from Germany. The remembered moment is sharply situated in Paris, but its importance lies in the way an ordinary errand becomes attached to his work on the Marquis de Rollebon. The Marquis’s face, he reflects, has paled like the ink as he has worked over it; the Paris memory thus belongs to the changing relation between Roquentin and the historical subject he has been trying to understand.

Paris also figures in an earlier separation from Anny. Six years before the present meeting, after they had separated by mutual agreement, Roquentin decided to leave for Tokyo and wrote to her. The wording of that letter became a point of conflict: he began it with a form of address that Anny rejected, insisting that neither should claim the other as a beloved or use a possessive intimacy they no longer shared. The episode does not make Paris the site of their separation, but it places the city within a history in which departure and distance have already tested their relationship.

Later, when Anny says she will be passing through Paris, she summons Roquentin to see her at the Hotel d’Espagne on February 20. The letter rekindles uncertainty rather than simple anticipation. Remembering earlier occasions in Meknes and Tangiers, when Anny had sent a note asking him to come immediately only to seem surprised or irritated when he arrived, Roquentin imagines that she may change her mind again. Paris becomes the setting of a possible reunion whose promise is unsettled by the remembered pattern of invitation and reversal.

Anny in London and the Limits of Intimacy

During their meeting, Anny reports that she was in a theatre in London, not performing with Candler but in a small theatre in Soho Square. The productions included The Emperor Jones, works by Synge and O’Casey, and Britannicus. The account briefly opens onto a life Anny has lived beyond Roquentin: other cities, theatrical work, and experiences he can ask about but cannot thereby possess.

The room in which they speak is marked by objects rather than by any renewed intimacy. A volume of Michelet’s History of France lies on the night-table, as it has before, and a reproduction of a portrait of Emily Bronte hangs above the bed. Anny eventually asks Roquentin to talk about himself. Yet as evening falls, his questions about her travels and the people she has met lose their hold. Those places and possible attachments seem to him like flashes of sunlight on a cold, dark sea: visible on the surface, but not a route back to closeness. They have not seen each other for four years, and the conversation reaches an impasse. Anny tells him she is expecting someone and asks him to leave.

The Journey Planned and the Journey Chosen

The following Sunday, Roquentin consults the Railway Guide and calculates that the train to Dieppe leaves at 5:38, while admitting that Anny may instead be driven away by the man she is expecting. He spends the day wandering around Menil-montant and the quays, acutely aware that only a few steps and walls separate him from her. At 5:38, he thinks, the previous day’s conversation will become a memory, and Anny, in her present form, will recede into the past alongside his memories of her as a younger woman in Meknes and London. Until then, he still imagines that he might see her again, persuade her, and take her away with him. He does not yet feel alone.

After Anny leaves, the imagined future of reunion gives way to a practical decision about Roquentin’s own future. He tells the Railwaymen’s Rendezvous waiter that he is going to Paris and needs a change. The declaration is direct, but the purpose it names is modest: change, not a settled plan for a new life. He begins to reckon with what living there would cost, imagining a monthly income of 1,200 francs, a room costing 300 francs, and food at 15 francs a day. The arithmetic makes relocation concrete, yet it cannot answer what he would do once there.

His imagined routine in Paris consists of walks, reading in libraries, a weekly movie, and inexpensive recreation. The questions accumulate because each activity leads to another empty interval. Spending his 300,000 francs in a year, buying new clothes, seeking women, or travelling would not help, he thinks; he has already had such things, and expects that he would end up as empty as he is now. With 14,400 francs in the bank and monthly coupons to cash, he has some material means to move, but neither money nor the prospect of a different city resolves his reluctance to act. He recognizes that he does not want to do anything, while also recognizing that any action would create more existence rather than abolish the existence he already finds oppressive.

Significance

Paris connects past and future without reconciling them. The city contains the remembered chestnut purchase and an earlier letter to Anny, while also serving as the destination of a journey Roquentin chooses after their reunion fails. Across these references, travel does not reliably produce adventure, intimacy, or a durable personal story: departures can leave relationships unresolved, and a reunion can end in silence and dismissal.

The ending keeps the meaning of the move deliberately unsettled. Roquentin counts expenses and imagines the ordinary days ahead, but the prospect of life in Paris does not become a solution to the problem of existence. As he writes, he thinks that the writing delays the onset of nausea, then continues to put down whatever comes into his mind. Paris is consequently less a promised escape than the next location from which he must face the question left unanswered in Bouville: what, if anything, can give action and continued life a purpose?