Shrove Tuesday

Shrove Tuesday in Bouville is less a public celebration than a day whose holiday character barely takes hold. For Antoine Roquentin, its flatness provides the setting for a consequential interruption: a letter from Anny, unheard from for five years, summons him to see her.

A Holiday Barely Observed

The day has little force in Bouville. There are hardly a hundred people in the whole town who dress up, and most people are at work. Roquentin calls it a flat, stale Shrove Tuesday, a holiday only in the faintest sense: cinemas hold matinees and schoolchildren are on vacation, while a vague festive feeling attracts attention and disappears as soon as it is noticed.

The day’s atmosphere is not presented as sustained revelry. It is an awkward pause in ordinary routines, a scattered suggestion of celebration that fails to become a shared event. That subdued public calendar accompanies Roquentin’s own unsettled state rather than relieving it.

Uneasy Recollection

Roquentin notes that lately he has been remembering his dreams too often and tossing enough at night to leave the blankets on the floor each morning. The brief account places involuntary recollection beside the day’s diminished festivity: while the town barely marks the occasion, his private consciousness keeps returning to material he cannot simply set aside.

A remembered Shrove Tuesday scene is grotesque and violent. In the dream, Roquentin and two other soldiers turn Maurice Barres over, pull off his trousers, and beat him until he bleeds after he offers them violets and mocks a soldier’s head wound. The soldiers then use the violet petals to draw Deroulede’s face on Barres’s backside. The extravagant reversal of patriotic ceremony into bodily humiliation belongs to the remembered dream, not to the town’s present-day observance; its recurrence helps explain why the narrator’s report of the holiday is shadowed by images that do not fit its muted public calm.

The Letter on Shrove Tuesday

As Roquentin goes downstairs, his landlady tells him there is a letter. The last letter he recalls receiving was from the curator of the Rouen public library, the previous May. This one is a long, thick yellow envelope from Anny. She has written after five years of silence, sending it to Roquentin’s old Paris address; it bears a postmark from the first of February.

Anny’s message is brief and urgent: she says she must see him. The letter turns an otherwise uneventful holiday into a point of decision. Roquentin remembers earlier notes from Anny in Meknes and Tangiers asking him to come at once; he used to run to her, only to find that she had nothing more to say and was irritated that he had come. That history makes the new summons uncertain rather than reassuring: he considers that she might refuse to see him or change her mind, even as he doubts she would deny having written.

A Day of Waiting

The summons does not make Roquentin joyful. He has felt idle and at a loose end since receiving it; at noon he is not hungry, but goes to eat to pass the time. The surrounding streets and businesses continue their ordinary life, and he heads to Camille’s on Rue des Horlogers, where the holiday’s vague, fleeting character gives way to the concrete business of waiting and deciding what to do next.

Shrove Tuesday therefore serves both as a calendar marker and as a contrast in the episode: the town’s holiday is barely perceptible, while Anny’s letter makes the day personally charged. The date brings together disrupted sleep, the return of disturbing dream material, and the prospect of renewing a relationship whose past meetings have made its promises difficult to trust.