The Railwaymen's Rendezvous is the Bouville bar where Antoine Roquentin pauses while preparing to leave for Paris. In this farewell scene, its proprietress offers a drink, recalls their easy acquaintance, and imagines his return; the ordinary warmth of the exchange contrasts with the suffering and estrangement moving through Roquentin's consciousness.

Setting and Farewell

As Roquentin walks through the town, the Railwaymen's Rendezvous comes into view in a sequence of shifting consciousness that gathers the macadam, ironmongers, and barracks into the streets he is leaving. He identifies the bar and re-enters the first-person present: he is going to Paris and intends to say goodbye to the proprietress. The place thus marks a literal stop on his route and a threshold between his life in Bouville and departure.

Roquentin tells the proprietress that he needs a change. She replies that he is lucky, then says she will miss him and offers him something to drink on the house. They sit and touch glasses. Her polite regret that she was used to him and that they got along makes the farewell personal without turning it into a declaration of intimacy.

The Proprietress and Its Regulars

The proprietress describes the bar through its returning customers, including sailors working for the Transat. Some disappear for as long as two years, traveling in Brazil or New York or working on a transport in Bordeaux, and then reappear for a drink. She remembers what each prefers, naming a dry vermouth for one customer and a Noilly Cinzano for another, and says that remembering is her business. The bar's continuity rests in this practical attention: people leave, but their habits remain legible to someone who expects them to come back.

Her invitation to Roquentin to return and say hello places him within that same pattern of temporary absence and reunion. She imagines a future visit as unremarkable and welcome, while Roquentin can only promise that he will come back to see her. The warmth of the exchange is real, but it cannot settle what departure means for him.

Departure and Narrative Significance

The bar's everyday sociability is set against the passage's recurring consciousness of suffering. Roquentin's thoughts turn to Anny and to a jazz tune that returns insistently; then the voice of departure locates the Railwaymen's Rendezvous, and the departing self recognizes itself as Antoine Roquentin, bound for Paris. The bar is therefore woven into a scene where consciousness moves between impersonal surroundings, remembered pain, and the practical act of leaving.

The proprietress's confident account of sailors returning gives the farewell a gentle counterpoint to Roquentin's break with Bouville. Her remembered drinks make return seem part of the ordinary rhythm of the place; his departure, by contrast, is framed as a need for change. The Railwaymen's Rendezvous holds both possibilities in view without resolving them: it is a familiar place he is leaving, and a place whose welcome depends on the chance that he may come back.