Roquentin abandons his study of Rollebon

Antoine Roquentin abandons his study of Rollebon when the historical reconstruction that had organized his days can no longer hold together. The decisive break is not simply a failure of research: as the Marquis fades from Roquentin’s imagination, Roquentin sees that he had made another man’s past a substitute for his own present. The unfinished biography ends alongside that refuge, leaving existence—not historical narrative—as the immediate problem.

The project and its first fracture

On Monday at three o’clock, Roquentin sits at his table with the file of letters he stole in Moscow, working on an account of Rollebon’s apparent will. His draft says that the Marquis must have been taken in by sinister rumours because, on 13 September, he wrote to his nephew that he had made his will. The archival detail seems to offer a foothold in the past, and Rollebon is still present to Roquentin as a warm, inward figure, waiting to be installed in history.

A possible objection interrupts the work. Rollebon may not have been frank with his nephew: if the plot failed, the nephew could serve as a defence witness before Paul I, and the supposed will might have been invented to make the Marquis appear innocent. Roquentin calls this objection minor, but it is enough to plunge him into thought. The problem reaches beyond whether one letter can be trusted. Roquentin recalls the fat waitress at Camille’s, M. Achille’s haggard face, and a room in which he had felt forgotten in the present. His own difficulty holding on to his past now seems to undermine his confidence that he can preserve someone else’s.

The second death of Rollebon

Roquentin tries to return to the sentence about the will. An immense sickness comes over him; his pen falls and splutters ink. He distinguishes this feeling from the Nausea: the room retains its ordinary, familiar appearance, and the table and pen do not seem newly heavy or solid. What has changed is Rollebon. The Marquis, who had just been alive within Roquentin, has died for a second time.

The loss is felt as the disappearance of a recurring presence, not as a discovery that Rollebon never existed. In the days when he was vivid to Roquentin, the Marquis could remain absent for several days, then appear again on a mysteriously fine day, his pale face and bluish cheeks returning to view. Even when Roquentin could not picture him, he felt Rollebon as a weight on his heart. Now Roquentin finds nothing left: the freshness of the image has vanished like the freshness of ink drying on the page.

He makes one last effort to summon Rollebon by repeating Mme de Genlis’s description of the Marquis’s small, wrinkled, pitted face and its unmistakable air of malice. The features come back readily—pointed nose, bluish cheeks, smile—but Roquentin recognizes them as an image he can shape, a fiction within himself rather than the recovered presence he had relied on. The effort sharpens the sense of loss rather than restoring the project.

The work is closed

At four o’clock, after sitting motionless for an hour, Roquentin sees that the room has not changed: white paper, pen, and inkwell remain on the table, and darkness is beginning to fall. Yet he knows he will never write again on the page already begun. He also renounces the routine of following Rue des Mutilés and Boulevard de la Redoute into the library to consult its archives. The end of the study thus has both a material sign—the abandoned sheet—and a practical one: he will no longer pursue Rollebon through the records.

Roquentin wants to get up and go out, anything to stupefy himself, but fears what will happen if he moves. He remains still and mechanically rereads the unfinished paragraph about the 13 September letter. His immobility holds him beside the work just as the work itself has stopped. The affair of Rollebon, once experienced like a great passion, is over; Roquentin knows he must find something else, but the next undertaking has not yet taken shape.

The bargain between the historian and his subject

The abandonment exposes the arrangement that had made the biography compelling. Rollebon had been Roquentin’s partner: the Marquis needed Roquentin in order to exist for him, while Roquentin needed the Marquis in order not to feel his own existence. Roquentin supplied the raw material—his own existence—without knowing what to do with it; Rollebon supplied the imposing appearance and the seeming purpose. In writing, Roquentin had imagined each gesture as belonging not to himself but to the man whose life he was reconstructing.

That displacement had allowed Roquentin to eat, breathe, and move as though each act derived its meaning from Rollebon. The Marquis had seemed to take up Roquentin’s life and display his own in its place; Roquentin became the means by which Rollebon lived, and Rollebon became Roquentin’s reason for living. The end of the study makes this dependence visible. When the historical figure can no longer be sustained, Roquentin cannot retreat into the past to escape the fact of his own presence.

From historical refuge to existence

The room’s ordinary appearance makes the turning point more stark, not less: nothing around Roquentin needs to change for the past to lose its hold. His earlier command that the past did not exist returns as the words that released Rollebon back into nothingness. History can preserve traces and furnish material for an image, but the image does not restore a living person to the present. The biography’s failure therefore becomes a limit on the kind of meaning Roquentin had tried to obtain from archival reconstruction.

After asking what he is to do with his life, and later what he is to do now that Rollebon no longer delivers him from himself, Roquentin struggles not to move. A movement of his shoulders escapes him; then the thing he had feared arrives, flowing through and filling him. His final recognition is not that he has found a replacement subject or a new historical purpose, but that existence is present without the Marquis’s mediation. Abandoning the study leaves him with no finished book and no ready answer, only the fact he had used the book to avoid: he exists.